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.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on 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,Fleshis 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
'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