David Szalay

Flesh David Szalay

Winner of the Booker Prize 2025! A 'Best Book of 2025' in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. 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 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. As these encounters shift into a clandestine relationship, Istvan's life spirals out of control. Years later, rising through the ranks from the army to the elite circles of London's super-rich, he navigates the twenty-first century's tides of money and power. Torn between love, intimacy, status, and wealth, his newfound riches threaten to undo him completely. Flesh is a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Spare and penetrating, it asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it. 'A masterpiece, told with virtuosic economy ... Pure brilliance from the first to the (devastating) last sentence.' - India Knight. 'Brilliance on every page.' - Samantha Harvey. 'Spare, visceral, urgent, compelling.' - Gary Stevenson.