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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.

**WINNER OF 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

Critic Reviews

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 Orbital)
Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money (David Nicholls)
A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise (William Boyd)
This is a marvellous novel. Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer (Tessa Hadley)
I hope David Szalay wins the Booker this year... Flesh is a masterpiece, told with virtuosic economy... Pure brilliance from the first to the (devastating) last sentence (India Knight)
Refreshing, illuminating and true… a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates (Financial Times)
[A] compulsive look at wealth and power, love and sex… Szalay has that rare ability to convey entire galaxies in the sparest writing
Flesh…has ensnared me… It’s rare to find prose this spare that doesn’t feel affect, but Szalay handles surface and depth with skill, as only great novelists can. Flesh is a revelatory novel
Hypnotically tense and compelling… An astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life (Booker Judges, 2025)
In István David Szalay has created a modern existential antihero in the grand tradition of Camus and Dostoevsky. Amid the random accidents and desultory decisions that shape his life, and come to feel like fate, he is at once a cool observer and a towering presence. Taut, spare and perfectly structured, Flesh reads like a gripping thriller which slowly gathers to itself the emotional power of classical tragedy (Carys Davies, author of Clear)
All stars
Most relevant
Despite the seeming lack of dialogue it said a lot about the human condition. I cried at the end.

It should be titled: Ok.

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I did not find this Booker quality. It was rather average and lack luster. The story line was flat and jumped periods of time and nothing stands out about the story. disappointing.

Why did it win the Booker?

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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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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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