Flesh - by David Szalay

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE AND A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence

From "the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have" (Esquire), a "captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic" (The Baffler) novel about a man whose life veers off course due to a series of unforeseen circumstances.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.

A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself--estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy.

"Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it" (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.

Review Quotes

"Reckoning, in a clear-eyed and reasonable way, with the reality of fate's cold indifference...[Szalay is] a master of the flinty, spare sentence...at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language"
--The Guardian

"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 Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital

"I can't think of another book that has lately haunted me more than David Szalay's Flesh--a book that so majestically and so beautifully depicts our journeys through this ever-changing world; and how we're all caught and carried by time and tide. When the world tests us, this is the story we'll return to, the one that will make us want to keep faith and believe, not only in the power of literature, but in each other."
--Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey

"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

"Flesh is a wonderful novel--so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money."
--David Nicholls, author of You Are Here

"Szalay offers a heartbreaking and revelatory portrait of a taciturn Hungarian man who serially attempts to build a new life after his traumatic adolescence... Propulsive... This tragedy will leave readers in awe."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

David Szalay is the author of Turbulence, London and the South-East, and All That Man Is. His novels have won and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and he has been awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and The Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna.