Flesh

Description

By (author) Szalay David

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**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

‘Brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money’ David Nicholls

‘Pure brilliance from the first to the (devastating) last sentence’ India Knight

‘Brilliance on every page’ Samantha Harvey

‘So much searing insight into the way we live now’ Observer

Through chance, luck and choice, one man’s life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London – in this captivating new novel about the forces that make and break our lives

Fifteen-year-old István 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, István 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.

‘An astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life’ Booker Prize Judges, 2025

‘A revelatory novel’ Sunday Times

‘Refreshing, illuminating and true’ Financial Times

‘One of the most astonishing books I’ve ever read’ Dua Lipa

‘Hugely entertaining, gripping like a thriller’ The Times

‘Visceral and compelling’ Gary Stevenson

‘Exciting, propulsive, emotional’ Sarah Jessica Parker

*A BOOK OF THE YEAR for the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Sunday Times, Independent, GQ and Daily Telegraph*

Review quote:
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

Review quote:
Flesh is
a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money

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A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure:
mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise

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This is
a marvellous novel. Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant.
David Szalay is an extraordinary writer

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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

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

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

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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

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Hypnotically tense and compelling… An
astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life

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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

Biographical note:

David Szalay is the aut