From Booker Prize-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 István 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. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István 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 century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s 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.

David Szalay's profile page

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 Vienna.

"This is a marvellous novel. Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer." —Tessa Hadley

"A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing, and disturbingly wise." —William Boyd

"With exquisite control and precision and insight, David Szalay renders lost men that you cannot forget." —Rachel Kushner