Flesh
by David Szalay · 2025
Buy on AmazonWINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 '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. This book doesn't fk around' Gary Stevenson 'So brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls 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 István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary.…
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"Will be analyzed and puzzled over by every reader."
Service95 Book Club — Archive Favorites · service95.com
"David Szalay’s first book in seven years won the 2025 Booker Prize. Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it, Flesh reads a bit like an immigrant bildungsroman crossed with Albert Camus. At the heart of it all is István, a Hungarian teen making his first stumbling steps into an adulthood that will bring him money and privilege. Along the way he’s beset by trauma, flashes of violence and the more mundane misunderstandings that come to shape his life."
NPR Books We Love — 2025 · apps.npr.org
Publishers Weekly's Best Books — 2025 · publishersweekly.com