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Flesh

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Flesh

By: David Szalay
Narrated by: Daniel Weyman
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.


**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**

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.

Chosen as a ‘Best Book of 2025’ by the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail

'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital

‘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

© David Szalay 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Money Tear-jerking
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Spare, bleak, morally ambiguous portrait of a man who faces both opportunity and tragedy with mild curiosity and, ultimately, acceptance. I can’t really say I enjoyed it but must admit it’s highly accomplished writing and definitely
worth reading.

Sorel meets Meursault

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This book, although not fast-paced, had me hooked right until the end. The main character is a man of few words, and yet the book was written so beautifully that it painted a thousand pictures. I love how the author trusted us to figure stuff out through the lapses in time. Highly recommend!

Gripping

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After an unpromising start for me - grooming ugghh - I'm surprised I liked this book. Loved the terse language, found the questions he was asked annoying & would probably answer the same way! Don't know what it's like to be a man but am sure many men are like this, led by physicality. Fascinating story of one life and quite liked the end - even though that final circumstance he's in would be many people worse fear.

Glad I persevered

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Bleak and hypnotic, FLESH has a Hemingway-esque spareness, a melancholy which is very compelling - and deeply humanist. It reminded me of Orwell’s observation about life in his essay, ‘Lear, Tolstoy & The Fool’:
“Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life. ‘Men must endure. Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all’—which is an un-Christian sentiment. Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next. And the enormous majority of human beings, if they understood the issue, would choose this world. They do make that choice when they continue working, breeding and dying instead of crippling their faculties in the hope of obtaining a new lease of existence elsewhere.”

Life is suffering

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Don't believe the hype, I read the reviews and I was taken in, amazing they said Book of the year so far, best book of 2025, a real page turner, for me I was glad when it was all over. It was like a movie that you think it will be okay, something will happen, so you keep watching as in the case you keep listening and hope something will happen, it never does. You know when you watch a movie that you kept watching and then when it ends you think stuff it, I just wasted 2 hours of my life. This is how I felt with this book but thankfully when you are listening you can be doing other things at the same time. The first two chapters were great and I thought to my self this is going to be good but the main character what a dreary dull man. I even jumped forward a few chapters. Perhaps it's me I am missing the point with this story, perhaps this is the reason of the book to make you feel how wonderful life is but this poor bloke had a terrible life.

Help

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The sincerity of the male protagonist takes centre stage... It is hard to stop reading/listening from the very first page. I will keep reading the author's work.

The sincerity of the male protagonist...

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