This is necessarily a tiny bite at a very large apple, a handful of personal selections that omits much more than it includes.

Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac (Penguin). A romantic novelist runs away from her impending marriage to spend a season at a grand hotel in a genteel lakeside resort (Vevey in all but name), and there finds what seems to be the start of a new life of freedom. Beautifully crafted prose, the best of Brookner’s usually rather dry offerings, and winner of the 1984 Booker Prize.

Robert Edric, In Desolate Heaven (Random House). Complex and touching story of post-World War I trauma revolving around two former British officers and the woman who befriends them, set in a Swiss spa town.

Graham Greene, Dr Fischer of Geneva (Penguin). Apocalyptic novella set in and around the lakeside residence of a rich misanthrope who decides to take his revenge on the fawning socialites who crave his money. A fluent and compelling read, published when Greene was 76.

Patricia Highsmith, Small g: a Summer Idyll (Penguin). Highsmith – who spent her last years living in a Ticinese village – is best known for Strangers on a Train (made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951), along with her many works of crime fiction centred on the character of Tom Ripley. Small g is focused on the characters who frequent a Zürich bar during one summer, with a story of love, sexuality and generosity expertly plotted around them. She died a month before its publication in 1995.

Henry James, Daisy Miller (Penguin). The novella that made James’s name, a witty, insightful portrait of a young American tourist visiting Lake Geneva who flirts and teases, and then travels to the Château de Chillon unchaperoned and so gets her comeuppance.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (Minerva/Random House). Seminal World War I novel of ideas that employs a group of patients in a Davos sanatorium to discuss ideas of love, war and death, the characters’ ongoing tuberculosis symbolizing the sickness of European society as a whole. Although this novel is acclaimed as the author’s greatest, it was received less than favourably in Davos itself, whose residents objected to the town’s portrayal as a place of neglect where sufferers stood little chance of being cured. This and Mann’s other books were later burned by the Nazis in his native Germany.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin). The famous tale of an idealistic doctor’s dabblings with the elemental forces of life, inspired by “a half-waking nightmare” and written near Geneva in the summer of 1816 as Mary Shelley’s offering in a ghost-story-writing competition dreamt up by Lord Byron.