Flesh

Shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2025

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 Istvn 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 mothers age as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvn 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 centurys tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of Londons 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.