Flesh

David Szalay's Flesh won the Booker Prize in November 2025. Szalay was previously longlisted for the Booker with All That Man Is in 2016, and Flesh confirms and extends what that earlier book promised: a novelist with a rare gift for mapping the social architecture of contemporary Europe through intimate, pressurized scenes. Flesh follows Istvan, a Hungarian teenager whose adolescence is upended by an affair with an older married neighbor. He emigrates to London, drifts through jobs, and eventually finds steady work as a driver for the very wealthy, a vantage point Szalay uses with characteristic precision.

What makes Flesh distinctive is Szalay's management of tone and distance. Istvan observes his own life with a detachment that reads less as passivity than as a survival strategy, and Szalay never editorializes on his behalf. The novel moves through decades of a single life in compact, pressurized scenes, and it accumulates meaning the way trauma does: obliquely, through displacement and return. The immigrant success story it appears to tell is being revised from the inside throughout.

At 368 pages, Flesh works well in courses on contemporary European fiction, diaspora and migration literature, or the novel of interiority. Szalay's economy of means makes it a useful teaching text for discussions of what fiction can do with indirection and what gets communicated through the gap between what characters say and what they register. Published by Scribner.