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_
_'A superb novel... mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise' ~ David Nicholls, author of One Day_
BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR DAVID SZALAY JOINS US FOR _FLESH,_ a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.
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.
_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.
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_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.
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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.