Flesh: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)

WINNER OF THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE AND A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence

"Flesh is at once intricate and spacious, it flows both fast and deep. There's brilliance on every page. Szalay is an ingenious conductor of time, and of the fates and forces that give shape to a life." --Samantha Harvey, author of Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.

A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself--estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy.

"Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it" (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.

David Szalay is the author of Turbulence, London and the South-East, and All That Man Is. His novels have won and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and he has been awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and The Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna.