Flesh (s)

At once panoramic and intimate, this masterful novel from the author of All That Man Is traces the path of a life brought low by outside events and ranges from post-communist Hungary to the London of the super-rich.

Winner of The Booker Prize 2025

From author David Szalay, comes a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp

Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

MEDIA REVIEWS

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

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

I hope David Szalay wins the Booker this year... Flesh is a masterpiece, told with virtuosic economy... Pure brilliance from the first to the (devastating) last sentence - India Knight

Refreshing, illuminating and true… a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates - Financial Times

[A] compulsive look at wealth and power, love and sex… Szalay has that rare ability to convey entire galaxies in the sparest writing - i

Flesh…has ensnared me… It’s rare to find prose this spare that doesn’t feel affect, but Szalay handles surface and depth with skill, as only great novelists can. Flesh is a revelatory novel - Sunday Times

Hypnotically tense and compelling… An astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life - Booker Judges, 2025

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