The 2025 Booker Prize winner might be the best option to finish your reading programme this year. The author, David Szalay, (David Szalay interview: ‘I wanted to write about what it’s like to be a living body in the world’ | The Booker Prizes), was born in Montreal in 1974 in a Jewish family of a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father. His family moved to Beirut, but then were forced to leave Lebanon after the onset of the Lebanese Civil War.
The summary is as follows: We follow István, who is a detached Hungarian man, from troubled early years in Hungary, through military service, to becoming a wealthy socialite in London. Szalay explores themes of masculinity, desire, power, and emptiness through István’s impulsive actions.
The observational prose is sparse, revealing a life driven by immediate bodily needs rather than the search for a deeper connection. The narrative uses minimal dialogue and blank space to convey István’s internal state as he navigates poverty, war, and then wealth. The constant query is about what drives a life and what makes it worth living.
The novel has gained numerous plaudits as follows:
“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
“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
“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” — India Knight
“Refreshing, illuminating and true… a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates” — Financial Times
“A compulsive look at wealth and power, love and sex… Szalay has that rare ability to convey entire galaxies in the sparest writing” ― i Newspaper
“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” ― Sunday Times
“Hypnotically tense and compelling… An astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life” — Booker Judges, 2025
“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
“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
Check if ‘Flesh‘ by David Szalay is in stock at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
First published 2025
368 pages in Jonathan Cape
ISBN-13 : 978-0224099783
David Szalay