Flesh Signed & Dedicated Edition
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Publishing:6th Mar '25
£18.99
Only available to order until 10th March 2025 at 10:00am, and will dispatch after that.
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£18.99(9780224099783)
'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital
'A superb novel ...mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise' David Nicholls, author of One Day
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 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. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István 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.
Chosen as a ‘Best Book of 2025’ by the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail
'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' Alex Preston, Observer
'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer' Tessa Hadley
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
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
A propulsive novel from the Booker-shortlisted writer about the forces that make — and break — a life * Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025* *
It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one… [There’s] so much searing insight into the way we live now. It’s a masterpiece * Observer, *Books to Look Out For 2025* *
[A] spare, propulsive novel * Guardian, *Books to Look Out For 2025* *
With exquisite control and precision and insight, David Szalay renders lost men that you cannot forget -- Rachel Kushner
Szalay’s 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 Hofmann, London Review of Books
ISBN: 9780224099783-S
Dimensions: 240mm x 156mm x 28mm
Weight: 500g
368 pages