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.

(From McClelland & Stewart)

Flesh is available in March 2025.

David Szalay is a Canadian-born, Vienna-based author. His novel All That Man Is was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and won the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize. It was also named one of the year's best books by the Guardian, Telegraph, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, NPR and The New York Times, among others. His other books include Turbulence, and London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. In October 2019, Szalay won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and the Reader's Choice Award.