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 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 * 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, 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