David Szalay (2025) Flesh

David Szalay (2025) Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. That puts David Szalay into the stratosphere of book sellers. Last year’s winner, Orbit, Samantha Harvey’s quote on the cover is ‘Brilliance on every page’.

 ‘When he’s fifteen, he and his mother move to a new town and he starts 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 new friends. After a while he does make one friend, another solitary individual.’

Is that a brilliant opening paragraph?

Not for me. Certainly in any writing schools they’d be telling you to write something that really grabs you in the first few lines.

Flesh is readable because it seems true. This did happen or could happen makes things worth reading for me.

István’s life. He isn’t trying to be anything. Things happen to him. He just gets on with it. That’s a way of life for people like me and the majority of the population. He’s both rich man and poor man. But there’s no Rudyard Kipling ‘If’ moment when all the man’s a man virtues of self are graded and he comes out being a better person, or essentially a British gentleman.  

When at a Tory Party fundraiser, a woman rants about migrants. But she’s quick to assure István she doesn’t mean people like him with his tens of millions. She means people like us.

István is more us than them. It’s a class thing. Not a man thing. Although that’s part of it.  Read on.   

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6