From Booker Prize-shortlisted author David Szalay, a stunning and visceral portrait of a life—full of attraction, desire, strength, fragility, and hurt.

István grows up alone with his mother in a small town in Hungary. He is hard to know, uncommunicative and defined, mostly, by what happens to him. He seems to go along with whatever comes his way, and a lot does come his way, some of it in unmanageable doses: sex, prison, the army, some lowly jobs that take him from Hungary to London. It's here that a chance encounter changes his course completely.

Leaving his modest beginnings behind, he suddenly finds himself among the super-rich. But just as he is slowly feeling comfortable in this new environment, the precarious edifice starts crumbling beneath him, until finally it comes crashing down altogether.

In Flesh, Szalay has conjured a character who is unknowable and blunt, yet fully realized and somehow incredibly loveable. This is a story of a life, about a body in the world, and an epic tale of one man's unpredictable rise and inevitable downfall.

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DAVID SZALAY was born in Montreal in 1974, and moved to the U.K. the following year. He went to Oxford University and has written a number of radio dramas for the BBC. He won the Betty Trask Prize for his first novel, London and the South-East (2008), along with the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was recently named one of the Telegraph's "Top 20 British Writers under 40," a Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, and he won the 2016 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, awarded by the Paris Review for an outstanding contribution to the magazine. His most recent novel, All That Man Is, was published in April 2016. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and won the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize. The novel was selected as a Book of the Year by the Guardian, Telegraph, New Statesman, TLS, Financial Times, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, NPR, and BBC Culture, among others. His book of stories, Turbulence, was published in December 2018. In October 2019, David was awarded both the prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize and the Reader's Choice Award. These days, David lives in Budapest.