Flesh

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 - A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.

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'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, 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 'a wonderful novel - so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls, author of One Day

David Szalay is the author of five previous works of fiction- Spring, The Innocent, London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. His work has been translated into over twenty languages.

Paperback / softback Trade paperback (UK) (Text)

368pp h233mm x w152mm x s27mm 446g