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From Booker-shortlisted 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 Istvan 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 Istvan 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.
Chosen as a ‘Best Book of 2025’ by the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail
‘Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money’ David Nicholls, author of One Day
‘It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one … So much searing insight into the way we live now’ Observer
‘Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer’ Tessa Hadley
Format: Paperback
Pages: 368
Imprint: Jonathan Cape UK
Publication date: 06/03/2025
Flesh
By David Szalay
Review by Marija
A fascinating and heart-breaking work, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
The writing is spare, and utterly compelling in its unyielding forward movement. The main protagonist Istvan, is neither a hero nor an anti-hero as he passively moves through his life as a piece of driftwood gliding through the shallows of the ocean. Yet the daily banal trivialities slowly, inexorably gather into a life that is eventually revealed as part of the greater social landscape of modern-day Europe.
Though I found Istvan at times remote, and often frustrating, the ending left me quite bereft, and with questions of what is a life after all - do we live it, does it live through us? Personally, I love authors who write in this way of a slow burn, a collection of small moments that lead to an ending that leaves you off-kilter and slightly dazed.
