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Flesh: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
Flesh: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
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Flesh: WINNER of the BOOKER PRIZE 2025
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Flesh: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025
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Flesh: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 by David Szalay [Premium Leather Bound]
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**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**
‘A masterpiece, told with virtuosic economy… Pure brilliance from the first to the (devastating) last sentence’ India Knight
‘Brilliance on every page’ Samantha Harvey
‘Spare, visceral, urgent, compelling. This book doesn’t f**k around’ Gary Stevenson
‘So brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money’ David Nicholls
Through chance, luck and choice, one man’s life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London – in this captivating new novel about the forces that make and break our lives
Fifteen-year-old István 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. As these encounters shift into a clandestine relationship, István’s life spirals out of control.
Years later, rising through the ranks from the army to the elite circles of London’s super-rich, he navigates the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power. Torn between love, intimacy, status, and wealth, his newfound riches threaten to undo him completely.
‘How do I get out of a reading slump? This is the book to do that’ Rhianna Dhillon, BBC Radio 4
‘A revelatory novel’ Sunday Times
‘So much searing insight into the way we live now’ Observer
‘Refreshing, illuminating and true’ Financial Times
‘Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant’ Tessa Hadley
‘One of the year’s best novels to date’ Daily Mail
‘Utterly engrossing and I read it all in a day’ 5* reader review
‘I was hooked and tried to read this book with any spare moment that I had’ 5* reader review
A ‘Best Book of 2025’ in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail
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by RG
Not a lot to enjoy in this book.
The main character was monosyllabic a style that took some getting used to.
It was joyless and none of the characters came to life.
Disappointing.
by Designer Dave
I really enjoyed Flesh. It follows the life of Istvan who is one of those guys who tends to just go along with things. Sometimes this works well for him and sometimes it does not.
Istvan is frustrating, he is a man of few words, most of which are “sure” or “okay”. I found myself willing him to THINK and SAY what he really feels, but you can’t help but like the guy.
He floats through life, experiencing rich and poor times, love and rejection and sometimes he doesn’t even know how he feels about it. I think a lot of us can identify with that, right?
He is not a bad guy, and we find ourselves routing for him when he experiences loss and battles addiction.
In the end he chooses to be the hero, and do the “right” thing, to his cost.
The book reads fast, with short dialogue down the pages. Sometimes you wonder “is something going to happen?” but it soon does, it is never boring and you always want to see what happens next.
I recommend Flesh if you want to read something different.
by Neasa MacErlean
Remarkable, moving, clear — a non politically correct novel which explains sex from a male point of view. That is done through the eyes of István, the Hungarian main character, and through two boys as well. Telling his story, and his move to England, the whole narrative shocks and keeps the reader worried that István’s life could fall apart on just about every page. It is not just that he is a working class Hungarian who moves into higher echelons in London, and that his hold there seems precarious. It also seems as if we all lead an unstable existence, and that sex and other strands of our lives could send us all over a precipice tomorrow.
by michael burt
Excellent story of one man’s life. My first Booker book and has made me realise Booker prize winners and not inaccessible to the average reader like me. Loved it. Thank you
by CR
A meaningless book about a worthless character. First thing that comes to mind besides a sad attempt to use Hemingway’s style of prose is why to write a book about such a hollow man who appears to be lacking any self-awarness? Just don’t call it a realism, because it is not. Why waste time on describing a useless life? Even if at some point the individual was awarded a medal of bravery in a sham war?
If there is nothing interesting, deep, eventful and purposeful that the author can share with his readers, except probably author’s favorite seduction scenes of a teenage boy by an old hooker, why on Earth waste his and readers time at all? And this is the Booker Prize winner? C’mon.
“How are you?” he asks, as he does that. “What d’you mean?” “What d’you mean what do I mean?” “It’s a weird question,” she says. “Is it?” “Yeah.”
Yeah, indeed, what a “literary realism “
by Viktoria B.
Cannot comprehend how this book could win the Booker Prize. One of the worst books I ever read, boring and shallow.
by Alan Goddard
Worth a read. Strangely lacking any real plot. The story of an east European’s life. Things happen to him but he doesn’t make things happen. It has high reviews, higher than I would give but definitely worth a read.
by Cliente Amazon
Excellent writing, dry prose, a lot of gaps to fill in! That is what makes a perfect novel to me. It engages the reader, but not the character. The protagonist is an empty shell in which the reader can travel. Yet, the emptiness of the shell is what makes the character: what he does and what he doesn’t do, what he understand of his life and what he (mostly) doesn’t understand of it, what he thinks he is and what the reader sees he’s not. A kind of bildsungroman, but where the building part has to be made by the reader. Disturbing and perfect novel!
by Jean-Marie Laporte
A display of women interested in sex with a relatively passive man coming from Hungary and going up the social ladder.
by Kindle Customer
Really well written. Reads almost poetically
by José M Vidal-Ribas
Very original way to write with only two verb tenses. The history spins and repeats in an spiral-like time line. Okay!
by Just a Number
The publisher blurb does no justice to the book’s pared down existentialist tone. The skill of Szalay lies in writing the book so the reader never knows if they should be rooting for the protagonist or not, and is he controlling the trajectory of his life, or being blown around by the winds of circumstance? A film that captures exactly the same tone is ‘Uzak’ (2002) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan: European loneliness and a male inability to communicate in the blank ephemeral culture created by modern capitalism.
by P. J. Martin
Flesh (Booker prize) by David Szalay An enjoyable read though whether it meets the Booker prize standard it is difficult to know. It’s certainly and inventive story. It starts off a bit naughty and then progress through bravery in the army in which he enlisted for want to something better to do, through low earnings until his bravery in preventing a street murder led him to be a protection officer for the hyper rich; to soaring to the heights and then crashing down to the depths. After a sparkling start, the reading becomes a little pedestrian and then there is a rush to the denouement. I’m still thinking about it which is good but I am not sure it is great literature.