Flesh

A Novel

De: David Szalay

Narrado por: Daniel Weyman

Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize

From Booker Prize finalist and “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have” (Esquire), a “captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic” (The Baffler) novel about a man whose life veers off course due to a series of unforeseen circumstances.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.

A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself—estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy. “Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it” (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.

©2025 David Szalay (P)2025 Simon & Schuster Audio

Conflicted Intrigue

Hmmm… A dozen great take-offs, with zero smooth landings. I’m probably just too unsophisticated to appreciate the true art and inner meaning…

Everything

I love it! What a story. I finished it in 2 days. I will recommend it to friends too.

boring and gratuitous descriptions of sex

The book is boring and filled with gratuitous descriptions of sexual incidents and not much else