Flesh

David Szalay’s Flesh is the kind of novel that earns its accolades through restraint rather than spectacle. Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, this sixth novel from the British-Canadian author tracks the life of Istvan, a Hungarian teenager who grows into a man of considerable wealth and power, yet never quite escapes the gravitational pull of the body he inhabits. It is a book about physical presence, about the ways masculinity is both constructed and suffered, and about the distances between the lives we build and the ones we actually live.

The novel opens in a provincial Hungarian apartment block where fifteen-year-old Istvan lives with his mother. He is new to the town, socially awkward, and struggling to navigate the rituals of adolescence. His only real connection is with a married neighbor, a woman close to his mother’s age, and their relationship shifts into something clandestine that Istvan barely comprehends. This early section establishes what will become the novel’s central tension: Istvan’s capacity for physical intimacy and violence exists in an uneasy symbiosis, and Szalay refuses to sentimentalize either impulse.

What follows is a life told in episodes that span decades. Istvan joins the military, serves in Iraq, becomes a bodyguard for London’s ultra-wealthy, and eventually reinvents himself as a property developer. Szalay compresses and expands time with surgical precision, giving certain moments the weight of years while entire decades pass in a handful of pages. The effect is disorienting in exactly the right way: you feel the shape of a life rather than its chronology.

Character Arcs and Development

Istvan is one of the most compelling protagonists in recent literary fiction precisely because he is so difficult to pin down. He is not articulate. He is not reflective in any conventional sense. His speech is built from fragments and refusals: “yeah,” “I don’t know,” half-finished thoughts that trail into silence. Szalay constructs a character whose interior life must be inferred from his actions and his silences, and the result is a portrait that feels startlingly real.

What makes Istvan’s arc so effective is its circularity. The novel begins and ends in roughly the same location, with Istvan back in Hungary, living again with his mother. But the man who returns is not the boy who left. The decades of violence, ambition, and compromised intimacy have left visible and invisible marks. Szalay tracks the slow accumulation of empathy in a man who spent most of his life treating it as a liability. By the final pages, Istvan’s capacity for genuine human connection, always present but long suppressed, surfaces in ways that are quietly devastating.

The supporting characters are drawn with equal care, even when they appear only briefly. The married neighbor of Istvan’s adolescence, the military comrades, the wealthy clients whose bodies he is paid to protect: each one illuminates a different facet of Istvan’s relationship to power, desire, and dependency. Szalay is particularly sharp on the dynamics between employer and employee, on how money reshapes the most basic human transactions.

Pacing

The novel’s pacing is one of its most distinctive achievements. Szalay alternates between scenes of compressed intensity and long stretches of ordinary routine, mimicking the actual rhythm of a lived life. A violent confrontation in Iraq occupies just a few pages; a single afternoon in a London apartment stretches across an entire chapter. This unevenness is deliberate and effective. It forces you to pay attention to the moments Szalay chooses to linger on, which are rarely the ones you would expect.

At 368 pages, Flesh never feels padded or rushed. The episodic structure gives each section the density of a short novel, and the transitions between time periods are handled with a confidence that makes the jumps feel inevitable rather than jarring. If the middle sections, particularly the London bodyguard years, occasionally risk repetition, Szalay earns back your trust with the precision of his final act.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

The title itself points to the novel’s central preoccupation: the body as both prison and passport. Istvan’s physical strength is what allows him to escape poverty, to survive war, to command respect in the world of the super-rich. But it is also what traps him in roles that demand the suppression of everything except the physical. Szalay writes about masculinity not as ideology but as lived experience, as a set of constraints that are felt in the muscles and bones before they are understood in the mind.

The novel is also, in a quieter way, a book about contemporary Europe and its economic and cultural fault lines. Istvan’s journey from a Hungarian apartment block to the penthouses of Mayfair traces the routes that capital and labor have carved across the continent. Szalay does not moralize about inequality; he simply shows you how it shapes a life, how it determines which doors open and which remain locked. The Iraq sections add another layer, connecting the personal violence of Istvan’s trajectory to the institutional violence of Western foreign policy.

There is a persistent tension between transactional and genuine connection that runs through every relationship in the book. Istvan’s early affair with his neighbor, his military bonds, his professional relationships with clients, his later romantic entanglements: all of them exist on a spectrum between intimacy and transaction. Szalay suggests that the distinction between the two is far less stable than we like to believe, and that the capacity for real connection requires a kind of vulnerability that Istvan spends most of his life avoiding.

Style and Voice

Szalay’s prose is lean to the point of austerity. He favors short declarative sentences, minimal description, and a close third-person perspective that stays tight to Istvan’s consciousness without ever becoming interior monologue. The effect is cinematic in the best sense: you see what Istvan sees, you register what he registers, but the emotional interpretation is left to you. This restraint makes the rare moments of lyrical description, a sunset over the Hungarian plain, the texture of an expensive suit, all the more powerful for their scarcity.

The dialogue is particularly well-crafted. Szalay has an exceptional ear for the way inarticulate people communicate, for the pauses and evasions that carry more meaning than the words themselves. Conversations in Flesh are often exercises in what is not being said, and the tension between surface politeness and underlying conflict gives even mundane exchanges a charge of suppressed emotion.

Verdict

David Szalay’s Flesh is a novel that earns its Booker Prize through discipline and intelligence rather than showmanship. It is not a comfortable read, and it does not flatter its protagonist or its audience. What it offers instead is something rarer: a convincing and deeply felt account of what it means to live inside a body, inside a class, inside a continent that is itself in constant transformation. For readers willing to meet Szalay on his own terms, to accept the silences and the ellipses as part of the story’s meaning, Flesh rewards with a kind of understanding that stays with you long after the final page.

Rating: 4.7/5

Frequently Asked Questions about Flesh

What is Flesh by David Szalay about?

Flesh follows the life of Istvan, a Hungarian teenager who grows from a shy, isolated boy in a provincial apartment block into a soldier, bodyguard, and eventually a wealthy property developer in London. The novel traces his journey across decades and continents, examining how physical strength, violence, and the desire for intimacy shape a single life against the backdrop of contemporary Europe.

Did Flesh win the Booker Prize 2025?

Yes, Flesh by David Szalay won the 2025 Booker Prize. The novel was also selected as a Best Book of 2025 by the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, and Daily Mail. It has been widely recognized as one of the most significant literary novels of the year.

Is Flesh by David Szalay based on a true story?

Flesh is a work of fiction, not based on a specific true story. However, Szalay has spoken about wanting to write about life as a physical experience, and the novel’s depiction of migration, military service, and the economic realities of contemporary Europe draws on observable social patterns rather than autobiography.

How many pages is Flesh by David Szalay?

The hardcover edition of Flesh published by Jonathan Cape is 368 pages. Despite its length, the novel’s episodic structure and lean prose style make it a relatively fast read, with each section functioning almost as a self-contained story within the larger narrative arc.

What genre is Flesh by David Szalay?

Flesh is literary fiction. It combines elements of the bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) with a broader social novel about class, migration, and masculinity in contemporary Europe. Readers who enjoy character-driven fiction with minimal plot ornamentation will find it particularly rewarding.

Is Flesh by David Szalay suitable for a book club?

Flesh is an excellent book club choice because its themes of masculinity, class, migration, and the body provoke strong discussion. The novel’s ambiguity and its refusal to judge its protagonist invite differing interpretations, and its episodic structure allows groups to focus on specific sections. Be aware that the book contains sexual content and scenes of violence.

What other books has David Szalay written?

David Szalay is the author of six novels, including London and the South-East, The Innocent, Spring, All That Man Is (which was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize), and Turbulence. All That Man Is, which follows nine men across Europe, is the closest in structure and theme to Flesh and is often recommended as a companion read.

How does Flesh compare to All That Man Is by David Szalay?

Both novels explore masculinity and European identity, but they differ significantly in structure. All That Man Is follows nine different men in separate stories, while Flesh traces a single protagonist across his entire lifetime. Flesh is generally considered the more emotionally cohesive and narratively ambitious of the two, which is reflected in its Booker Prize win, while All That Man Is was shortlisted in 2016.