Roddy Doyle, Chair of judges, said:

‘The judges discussed the six books on the shortlist for more than five hours. The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the other great novels, was Flesh – because of its singularity. We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read.  

‘At the end of the novel, we don’t know what the protagonist, István, looks like but this never feels like a lack; quite the opposite. Somehow, it’s the absence of words – or the absence of István’s words – that allow us to know István. Early in the book, we know that he cries because the person he’s with tells him not to; later in life, we know he’s balding because he envies another man’s hair; we know he grieves because, for several pages, there are no words at all.    

‘I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him. The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter. The book is about living, and the strangeness of living and, as we read, as we turn the pages, we’re glad we’re alive and reading – experiencing – this extraordinary, singular novel.’ 

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

David Szalay is the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. Born in Canada, Szalay has lived in Lebanon, the UK, Hungary, and now Vienna. 

He is the author of six works of fiction that have been translated into over 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. 

Szalay’s debut novel, London and the South-East, won Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes in 2008. All That Man Is was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. Szalay won the Edge Hill Prize in 2019 for his short story collection Turbulence. Flesh is his sixth work of fiction.

In 2010 Szalay appeared in the Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40, and he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.

Szalay isn’t the only writer of Hungarian heritage to have won the Booker or International Booker Prize: László Krasznahorkai, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, won the International Booker Prize in 2015.

Read more about David Szalay

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.’

Luke Brown, Financial Times 

‘Such novels are now rare, as male writers seem increasingly frightened to describe and reckon with the potentially destructive aspects of their character. In this context Flesh feels especially refreshing, illuminating and true. More than that, it is a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates.’ 

Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times 

‘Once or twice a year, I discover a novelist who is so exciting to read I want to share their work with everyone I know – the kind of writer who makes me want to write fiction… It’s rare to find prose this spare that doesn’t feel affected, but Szalay handles surface and depth with skill, as only great novelists can. Flesh is a revelatory novel that will make you look afresh at every eastern European doorman or bouncer you encounter.’ 

Keiran Goddard, Guardian

‘There will be a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues. Because, at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language.’

Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

‘A superb, surprisingly propulsive novel, one of the best of the year so far, that allows us to know a character on a deeply intimate level with that character barely saying a word and which, through its flat, airless, colourless prose captures something of the alienated despairing fatalism at the heart of modern life.’

‘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

Flesh’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, has published the most Booker Prize winners in the history of the prize, with nine previous Booker winners: in 1974 (The Conservationist), 1976 (Saville), 1981 (Midnight’s Children), 1984 (Hotel du Lac), 1991 (The Famished Road), 1998 (Amsterdam), 2007 (The Gathering), 2011 (The Sense of an Ending) and 2024 (Orbital). Flesh is the publisher’s tenth winner.