Flesh

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

From Booker shortlisted author David Szalay, comes a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp From Booker shortlisted author David Szalay, comes a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp 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 currents of 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, Flesh is 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.

Reviews

Szalay's writing is exact and true and always subtly intelligent -- Tessa Hadley, author of Free Love
Szalay's prose... is frequently brilliant, remarkable for its grace and economy. He has a minimalist's gift for the quick sketch, whether of landscapes or human relationships -- Garth Greenwell, New York Times Book Review
A willingness to leave the dots unjoined is one of the virtues that make Mr Szalays fiction so rewarding * Economist *
Szalay is capable of conjuring tenderness from any situation and is so honest about the unpredictability of desire * Observer *
Szalays 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 Hoffman, London Review of Books

Author Bio

David Szalay is the author of four previous works of fiction- Spring, The Innocent, London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, and All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Budapest.