Book recommendations
Eight Booker-nominated novels featuring characters with Hungarian heritage
As Hungarian-British author David Szalay wins the Booker Prize for Flesh, here are eight Booker-nominated novels with Hungarian characters at their heart
David Szalay’s Booker win comes in the same year that Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Krasznahorkai won the International Booker Prize in 2015 for his entire body of work and was shortlisted in 2018 for his short-story collection, The World Goes On.
Alongside Szalay and Krasznahorkai’s works, we’ve picked out five other gems from the Booker library that feature characters with Hungarian heritage – whether that’s a couple of pleasure-seeking basketball players, a mysterious patient in a makeshift army hospital, or various young women and men trying to find their feet in London.
Flesh by David Szalay
Spare but propulsive, Flesh charts protagonist István’s rise from a housing estate in Hungary to the mansions of London’s super-rich. A meditation on class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity, Szalay’s Booker Prize 2025 winning novel is a compelling portrait of one man from adolescence to old age.
In an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Szalay explained: ‘Even though my father is Hungarian, I never felt entirely at home in Hungary. I suppose, I’m always a bit of an outsider there and living away from the UK… for so many years I also had a similar feeling about London. So, I really wanted to write a book that stretched between Hungary and London and involved a character who was not quite at home in either place.’
The Booker Prize 2025 judges described Flesh as a book ‘about living, and the strangeness of living’, remarking that it was an ‘extraordinary, singular novel’.
Buy the book
All That Man Is by David Szalay
This year wasn’t the first time David Szalay found himself in the Booker Prize limelight. All That Man Is, Szalay’s fourth novel, was shortlisted in 2016. It’s made up of nine stories, each one featuring a different man. One of the nine men is Balázs, a personal trainer who travels from Hungary to London with a client.
As Max Liu noted in article about how the Booker Prize 2025 longlist explores masculinity, ‘Flesh reads like an extension of the chapter about Balázs… Like István, Hungarian Balázs moves to London where he works as a bodyguard and feels perplexed by a city that is “made of money”.’
In a review of All That Man Is for The New Yorker, James Wood said the novel is ‘bracingly unsentimental about male desire and male failure. Because he [Szalay] writes mostly from inside his characters’ heads, in jagged bursts of free indirect style, he can present his reduced and impaired men without judgment or commentary.’
Buy the book
The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, George Szirtes and John Batki
Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s collection of 21 short stories was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018, three years after he won the prize for his entire body of work, in 2015.
The World Goes On – translated into English from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, George Szirtes and John Batki – is a philosophical and enigmatic collection of tales praised by the Guardian as ‘a masterpiece of invention and utterly different from everything else’. In one story, a Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. In another, a traveller encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges.
Krasznahorkai, known for his uncompromising, hypnotic writing style – and for his very long sentences, sometimes several pages long – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. He was recognised for ‘his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art’.
Buy the book
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008, The Clothes on Their Backs is the tale of a woman searching for her place in the world.
In a red-brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road in London, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid parents, refugees from Hungary. One morning, a glamorous older man appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. He is her Uncle Sándor – but why is he so violently unwelcome in her parents’ home?
In an article picking out some of the best novels nominated for the Booker in the noughties, John Self says Linda Grant’s book is one of ‘exceptional range and empathy, from antisemitism under Hungary’s wartime Fascist regime, to the readjustments for exiles in modern-day London, who arrived with almost nothing’.
Buy the book
Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993, Under the Frog follows two Hungarian basketball players, Pataki and Gyuri. The two men do their best to avoid army service while they play basketball around the country, searching out pleasures while living under a totalitarian regime.
Described as being ferociously funny and bitterly sad, the book is set in post-war Hungary between 1944 and 1956. Fischer’s debut novel was partly inspired by his parents, who were both professional basketball players in Hungary.
According to Peter Reading in the Independent, the novel is ‘a funny, slangy, tragic, impeccably researched romp… A richly convincing line-up of skivers, copulators, opportunists and, above all, survivors in the face of oppression.’
Buy the book
Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson
In Almost English, Hungarian teen Marina lives in a small flat in west London with her emotionally delicate mother Laura and three elderly female relatives. She feels out of place inside her traditional family and longs to escape their rigid expectations, convincing them to send her away to boarding school. But the freedom she wants isn’t as it seems, and she finds herself feeling miserable and homesick.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013, Almost English explores the notion of identity and culture through the eyes of an awkward and nervous 16-year-old who is desperate to fit in.
Bella Bathurst in the Guardian said it is ‘Beautifully written, warm, funny and knowing, it manages to seize an entire slice of Europe for itself…it is the Hungarians who take over the novel, bounding through London like wolfhounds, exotic and magnificent and just a little bit sinister.’
Buy the book
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize 1992 and Golden Booker Prize-winning novel follows an initially unnamed protagonist as he is being cared for in a makeshift hospital in Italy during the Second World War.
Suffering from severe burns and amnesia, his identity is revealed to be that of Hungarian desert explorer, László de Almásy. The novel also follows the stories of a Canadian nurse, Hana, a Sikh British Army sapper, Kip, and a Canadian-Italian thief, Caravaggio, who are each escaping tortured pasts.
Michael Dirda, writing in the Globe and Mail, said ‘It promises serenity and order in the deliberateness of its prose, but repeatedly knocks the reader off balance, and ends by a sudden widening of its vistas into our fallen modern world. That climax is fully prepared, but strikes, just a little, a tone of political correctness.’
Buy the book
Oxygen by Andrew Miller
Like winner David Szalay, Andrew Miller was making his second appearance on a Booker Prize shortlist in 2025 (for The Land in Winter), having also been nominated back in 2001 for his novel Oxygen.
Set in 1997 between California and Hungary, Oxygen follows the lives of cancer patient Alice, her two sons, and a seemingly unconnected Hungarian playwright, László Lázár. As Alice’s sons return home to help care for their mother, they both try to confront their failures. Meanwhile László contends with the guilt and regret from his actions during the Hungarian uprising that still haunt him.
The Chicago Tribune called the novel ‘poignant, probing, brainy fiction, animated by an intense and complex narrative drive, grounded in a vivid sense of place and character, and enlivened by a sly, stoical wit that keeps cropping up where you least expect it’.
Buy the book
Features
