Flesh

Szalay’s prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments, and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste

Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books

A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise

William Boyd

This is a marvellous novel. Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer

Tessa Hadley

With exquisite control and precision and insight, David Szalay renders lost men that you cannot forget

Rachel Kushner

In István David Szalay has created a modern existential antihero in the grand tradition of Camus and Dostoevsky. Amid the random accidents and desultory decisions that shape his life, and come to feel like fate, he is at once a cool observer and a towering presence. Taut, spare and perfectly structured, Flesh reads like a gripping thriller which slowly gathers to itself the emotional power of classical tragedy

Carys Davies, author of Clear

[A] spare, propulsive novel

Guardian, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

A propulsive novel from the Booker-shortlisted writer about the forces that make — and break — a life

Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one… [There’s] so much searing insight into the way we live now. It’s a masterpiece

Observer, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

Flesh is at once intricate and spacious, it flows both fast and deep. There's brilliance on every page. Szalay is an ingenious conductor of time, and of the fates and forces that give shape to a life

Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital

Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money

David Nicholls

The moving and propulsive whole-life story is perfect for fans of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart

Independent, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

Flesh is a magnificent novel by a formidably gifted writer. Tense, addictive, devastating, wise, it confirms Szalay’s singular brilliance

Ben Hinshaw

Flesh is never less than completely gripping. Each subsequent chapter alights on another stage in István’s life, like a stone skimming over water… [but] also works, quite brilliantly, as a perfectly contained short story, able to stand alone as well as driving the novel to its tragic denouement

Bookseller

[With] pacey, provocatively terse prose… Szalay handles the story with patience and resourcefulness. Writing about the kind of figure who is usually given short shrift in literary fiction, he avoids the obvious showdowns, allowing illness and accident to deepen the characters’ attachments in unexpected ways

Tim Parks, London Review of Books

Szalay has succeeded in writing a kind of anti-Bildungsroman

Literary Review

Flesh…has ensnared me… It’s rare to find prose this spare that doesn’t feel affect, but Szalay handles surface and depth with skill, as only great novelists can. Flesh is a revelatory novel

Sunday Times

[A] compulsive look at wealth and power, love and sex… Szalay has that rare ability to convey entire galaxies in the sparest writing

i

‘Refreshing, illuminating and true… a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates’

Financial Times

Szalay delivers a helter-skelter yarn in enviably crisp prose

Mail on Sunday

A gripping study of the choice that can make or break a life… Until the last page, it’s hard to know how to feel about him [Istvan]… Szalay draws characters superbly, drives the plot deftly and mercilessly

Spectator

Flesh…has more than just a biblical allusion in common with [Samuel] Butler’s masterpiece [The Way of All Flesh]. Thrillingly…it also shares its bold ontological and artistic ambitions… Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive

Guardian

With exacting prose and astonishing incisiveness, Flesh portrays money’s parameters from the perspective of someone encountering it for the first time

i

The author’s elegant, stripped-back prose powers a narrative rich in insight and pathos

Economist

Brilliant from the first lines to the last

Chetna Maroo