Flesh

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 OrbitalFlesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money – David NichollsA superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise – William BoydThis is a marvellous novel. Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer – Tessa HadleyI 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 KnightRefreshing, 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 * i *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 * Sunday Times *Hypnotically tense and compelling… An astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life – Booker Judges, 2025In 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 ClearA propulsive novel from the Booker-shortlisted writer about the forces that make — and break — a life * Financial Times, Books to Look Out For 2025 *It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one… [There’s] so much searing insight into the way we live now. It’s a masterpiece * Observer, Books to Look Out For 2025 *[A] spare, propulsive novel * Guardian, Books to Look Out For 2025 *With exquisite control and precision and insight, David Szalay renders lost men that you cannot forget – Rachel KushnerSzalay’s prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments, and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste – Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books

David Szalay is the author of six works of fiction, including 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 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 more than thirty languages.

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