Everything you need to know about Flesh by David Szalay, winner of the Booker Prize 2025

A spare but propulsive novel, Flesh follows a man from adolescence to old age as he 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. Their encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István barely understands, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the 21st 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.   

Flesh asks profound questions about what drives a life, what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

Find out more about Flesh

The opening paragraphs of Flesh read:

When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts at a new school. It’s not an easy age to do that – the social order of the school is already well established and he has some difficulty making friends. After a while he does make one friend, another solitary individual. They sometimes hang out together after school in the new Western-style shopping mall that has just opened in the town. 

‘Have you ever done it?’ his friend asks him. 

‘No,’ István says. 

‘Me neither,’ his friend says, making the admission seem easy somehow. He has a simple and natural way of talking about sex. He tells István which girls at school he fantasises about, and what he fantasises about doing to them. He says that he often masturbates four or five times a day, which makes István feel inadequate since he usually only does it once or twice. When he admits that, his friend says, ‘You must have a weak sex drive.’ 

It may be true, for all he knows. 

He doesn’t know what it’s like for other people. 

He only has his own experience. 

Read a longer extract from Flesh

‘This is a novel about a man who is remarkably detached from his body and desires, and while he rises in class strata and leaves his home in Hungary for London, he is regretfully followed by his past. 

‘Szalay has a talent for only telling the good parts. This is the story of a man’s life, from his youth to deep into adulthood, and yet there are gaps left in the protagonist’s life that Szalay leaves uncovered. He generously allows the reader to fill them in, and yet there is not one wonky transition. 

‘Flesh is a disquisition on the art of being alive, and all the affliction that comes along with it. The emotional detachment of the main character, István, is sustained by the tremendous movement of the plot. The pace of this novel speaks to one of the greater themes; the detachment of our bodies from our decisions.’

‘It can be hard to identify the starting point of a novel. Flesh sort of evolved into existence. I knew I wanted to write a book with a Hungarian end and an English end, since I was living very much between the two countries at the time and felt that that needed to be reflected in my choice of subject. And given that, writing about a Hungarian immigrant at the time when Hungary joined the EU seemed like an obvious way to go. So it would be, to some extent, a novel about contemporary Europe, and about the cultural and economic divides that characterise it. I also wanted to write about life as a physical experience, about what it’s like to be a living body in the world – whatever divides us, we all share that. Those were the ingredients that I started with.’

Read our interview with David Szalay

‘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 and London 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.’ 

Listen to David Szalay being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme

‘I wanted to write dialogue which reflected the way people actually speak. It generates a humorous aspect, inevitably… because it’s so banal, but I think it contributes to the sense of realism… That’s what then generates the kind of emotional engagement… without which the book wouldn’t really work.’

Watch David Szalay in conversation with Dua Lipa at the New York Public Library

Writing about masculinity for the Booker Prizes website, John Self said: ‘As the title indicates, the body, with its potential to be both a man’s ruin and his living, is a central theme of David Szalay’s Flesh… This dissociation between István’s experiences and his inability to find the language to process them is crucial to understanding him. When people talk to him, he tends to reply simply: ‘Yeah’ or ‘Okay’. Pages of clipped dialogue are surrounded by white space, as if the reader must fill the emptiness with their interpretation of István’s sparse words. It is very much like talking to a certain kind of man.’

Read more about how this year’s longlist explores masculinity

The Booker Prize 2025 judges said: ‘While we were impressed by Szalay’s take on masculinity – and how it often operates as paralysing indifference – we were mostly interested in the novel’s display of social mobility. Despite the fact that it occurs almost by accident, this is a novel about class ascension. Because of his past, István’s rise will always come at a cost. His origin will inevitably poke holes in his story until it takes over completely.’

Read more comments from the judges about this year’s shortlist