Flesh A Novel

David Szalay

eBook - 2025

From Booker Prize finalist and "the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have" (Esquire), a "captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic" (The Baffler) novel about a man whose life veers off course due to a series of unforeseen circumstances.Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the de...fining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined. A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself—estranged from and by... more