Flesh
David Szalay
2025· Jonathan Cape· 368 pages
Synopsis
'A revelatory novel' Sunday Times
'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital
A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.
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. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvan himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on 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.
Chosen as a 'Best Book of 2025' by the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail
'Flesh is a wonderful novel - so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls, author of One Day
'It's been a long time since I've been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one ... So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer
'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer' Tessa Hadley
'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital
A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.
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. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvan himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on 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.
Chosen as a 'Best Book of 2025' by the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail
'Flesh is a wonderful novel - so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls, author of One Day
'It's been a long time since I've been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one ... So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer
'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer' Tessa Hadley
Genres
FictionLiteraryPsychological