Eight books by writers from Switzerland, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Heidi and The Judge and His Hangman.
Switzerland's Nobel laureates in literature include the poet Carl Spitteler, in 1919, and Hermann Hesse, a Swiss citizen from 1924, in 1946. The country has four national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Crime writing is a strong strand: Friedrich Glauser's interwar Thumbprint sends Sergeant Studer through the Bernese countryside, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Judge and His Hangman, set around Bern, probes hidden corruption.
Johanna Spyri's Heidi, set in the Graubünden mountains and in Frankfurt, is the classic Alpine story. Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, writing in French, set Terror on the Mountain among Valais villagers facing a haunted high pasture. Robert Walser's The Walk sends a wandering narrator through towns and countryside in the early twentieth century.
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The classic of Alpine Switzerland, contrasting an orphan's life in the Graubünden mountains with nineteenth-century Frankfurt and showing village and pastoral life.
A detective novella set around Bern and the Lake Biel region, probing Swiss respectability, institutions and hidden corruption.
A bleak crime novel moving from Zurich to the Graubünden and Swiss cantonal police culture, questioning the orderly image of Swiss life.
A retired man is stranded by storms in a Ticino mountain village, where landslides and rain reflect the fragile alpine landscape.
Interwar detective fiction featuring Sergeant Studer in the Bernese countryside, with authentic rural dialect, institutions and social detail.
A wandering narrator's stroll through Swiss towns and countryside, capturing everyday life, small officials and landscape in early twentieth-century Switzerland.
A restless young man drifts through jobs and small-town Swiss society in the early twentieth century, showing its bourgeois manners and routines.
Valais alpine villagers confront a haunted high pasture, showing mountain farming life, superstition and the harshness of the landscape.
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