review
Seraina Kobler’s fourth novel, Valley of Swallows, imagines ‘a different Switzerland in a new time’, where the cities have fused into a dominant ‘Metropolitane’ and the Alps have become a sealed exclusion zone, officially for power generation but in practice because repeated disasters have made the mountains ungovernable.
Alesch Mastai is a scientist at a University on Lake Geneva, leading a team working on subthermal fusion. Daily life around Lake Geneva looks picturesque, but is characterised by shortages and strain: smashed shopfronts, protests, queues, and the sense that the social contract has started to fray.
At a heavily-guarded energy conference in a luxury hotel, Alesch is handed an envelope and a small package that reminds him of his childhood, and Annetta, his first love. The package contains pages torn from an old book of Alpine legends. One tale, titled ‘Am ewigen Firn’ (‘On the eternal firn’) – ironically, since the firn is now under threat due to the irreversible melting of the glaciers – has protagonists who are also named Alesch and Annetta, and whose love story ends tragically, with Annetta becoming a ghost that causes many natural disasters.
When the university lab is forced to shut temporarily after an incident that may be sabotage, Alesch is given an assignment with a political edge. He is to return to his home village of Pradetta, in the mountains, which is now inside the restricted zone. It is Alex’s job to persuade those residents who have not yet signed relocation agreements to do so.
It is a tense homecoming. The locals are wary, the landscape is visibly changing, and Alesch’s loyalties are split between the people who stayed, the policymakers who need signatures, and the instincts he has learnt to distrust.
Sitting at the crossroads between climate fiction, dystopian suspense, and questions of belonging, Kobler’s cli-fi premise is threaded through with deft storytelling. The narrative is written in clear and propulsive prose, and provides plausible specificity on energy research without tipping over into hard sci-fi. The multilingual texture, with touches of Romansh and French, helps root the story in a very Swiss sense of place and fracture. It should appeal to readers of climate-forward speculative fiction with strong regional character, such as Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.
Find out more: https://www.diogenes.ch/leser/titel/seraina-kobler/tal-der-schwalben-9783257073775.html
All recommendations from Spring 2026