Description

**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

‘Brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money’ David Nicholls
‘Anyone can pick up Flesh and appreciate it’ Jennette McCurdy
‘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 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.

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

‘A revelatory novel’ Sunday Times

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

‘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*

Publisher Review

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 In Istvan 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 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* * [A] spare, propulsive novel * Guardian, *Books to Look Out For 2025* * With exquisite control and precision and insight, David Szalay renders lost men that you cannot forget — Rachel Kushner 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 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 Flesh is never less than completely gripping. Each subsequent chapter alights on another stage in Istvan’s life, like a stone skimming over water… [but] also works, quite brilliantly, as a perfectly contained short story, able to stand alone as well as driving the novel to its tragic denouement * Bookseller * [With] pacey, provocatively terse prose… Szalay handles the story with patience and resourcefulness. Writing about the kind of figure who is usually given short shrift in literary fiction, he avoids the obvious showdowns, allowing illness and accident to deepen the characters’ attachments in unexpected ways — Tim Parks * London Review of Books *