WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025, David Szalay's captivating and astonishingly moving novel about the forces that make and break our lives
Through chance, luck and choice, one man's life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London...
Fifteen-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he becomes isolated, with his neighbour - a married woman - as his only companion. When a clandestine relationship begins between them, his life spirals out of control.
As the years pass, Istvan moves from the army to the circles of London's elite. His competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth win him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
About the Author
David Szalay is the author of six works of fiction, including London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Industry Reviews
Szalay’s prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments, and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste
-Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books
A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise
-William Boyd
This is a marvellous novel. Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer
-Tessa Hadley
With exquisite control and precision and insight, David Szalay renders lost men that you cannot forget
-Rachel Kushner
In István David Szalay has created a modern existential antihero in the grand tradition of Camus and Dostoevsky. Amid the random accidents and desultory decisions that shape his life, and come to feel like fate, he is at once a cool observer and a towering presence. Taut, spare and perfectly structured, Flesh reads like a gripping thriller which slowly gathers to itself the emotional power of classical tragedy
-Carys Davies, author of Clear
[A] spare, propulsive novel
-Guardian, *Books to Look Out For 2025*
A propulsive novel from the Booker-shortlisted writer about the forces that make — and break — a life
-Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025*
It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one… [There’s] so much searing insight into the way we live now. It’s a masterpiece
-Observer, *Books to Look Out For 2025*
Flesh is at once intricate and spacious, it flows both fast and deep. There's brilliance on every page. Szalay is an ingenious conductor of time, and of the fates and forces that give shape to a life
-Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital
Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money
-David Nicholls
The moving and propulsive whole-life story is perfect for fans of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart
-Independent, *Books to Look Out For 2025*
Flesh is a magnificent novel by a formidably gifted writer. Tense, addictive, devastating, wise, it confirms Szalay’s singular brilliance
-Ben Hinshaw
