David Szalay’s Flesh, a novel that explores contemporary masculinity through the eventful life of a Hungarian man across the decades, was the “unanimous” choice as winner of this year’s Booker Prize. It was also the right choice.
“It was the emphatic winner,” said Irish writer Roddy Doyle, the chair of the 2025 judging panel and a previous winner himself. He and fellow selectors Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Power and Kiley Reid are convinced they have whittled down the original list of 153 books to the most deserved champion from the six shortlisted contenders. “We all really felt this book in particular stood out. It was unanimous. We didn’t need a formal vote. Flesh was the book we liked and admired the most. It moved and impressed us and is a very, very special book,” said Doyle, who won for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in 1993.
This year’s shortlist was a strong one, made up of experienced writers in command of their trade (they have 42 novels between them in the locker) all writing in some way about the theme of identity – but none more compellingly than Szalay, whose urgent and honest 349-page novel taps into timely anxieties about manhood.
Andrew Miller’s excellent The Land in Winter and Susan Choi’s moving Flashlight both had worthy claims to the award – and Katie Kitamura’s bold novel Audition was commendable, too. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits was an entertaining read, although it lacked the same urgency as Flesh. Published in September The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai had been one of the bookies’ favourites to win. Desai’s 670-page epic met widespread acclaim from the critics, although I myself found it somewhat meandering and vexatious.
The contrast in style between that and Flesh could not be greater. Szalay’s winning novel, which encompasses teenage sex, infidelity, murder, death and war alongside everyday struggle, is written in prose that is pared to the bone. Each chapter is almost a self-contained unit and Szalay manages to be realistic and deft without being sensationalist. He leaves major events – such as the Iraq war and Covid – to take place between chapters and provides almost no detail about key events in his protagonist’s life; even István’s spell in a young offenders’ institution is somewhat elided.
‘Flesh’ follows the life of a Hungarian man from adolescence to late-middle age (Jonathan Cape)
Yet Szalay writes with terse precision about the consequences of major events on one’s daily life, through innovative and spare narration that is deeply affecting. Szalay allows the reader to fill the space, “to observe – almost to create – the character with him,” in Doyle’s summary. One example is the number of times the protagonist says the word “Okay” throughout the story, in lieu of words unspoken. The sparse style allows the darkness and understated complexity to gradually take a grip on the reader’s imagination.
Szalay, who was born in Montreal in 1974 to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father, but grew up in London, was previously nominated in 2016 for All That Man Is, a collection of nine linked stories about different men across Europe. He summed up Flesh as a book about “being a body in the world” and the novel is partly about life as a physical experience. The penetrating prose takes the action from a quiet apartment complex in Hungary to the world of London’s super-rich and allows the author to explore contemporary Europe and the way it is riven with cultural and economic divides. “I knew I wanted to write a book with a Hungarian end and an English end, since I was living very much between the two countries at the time,” Szalay remarked.
Whether any of that constitutes a ‘defence’ of masculinity I don’t know. When I was writing the book, I tried not to think about these things in abstract terms
David Szalay
It is the way Szalay brings such an introverted protagonist to life that makes the book so hypnotic. Over 350 pages, he asks profound questions about what drives an existence: what makes it worth living and what sometimes shatters it. Flesh is a universal story of one man’s triumphs, tragedies, downfalls and humiliations – about how the world can leave you “absurdly exposed”. Nothing reveals more about the precarious nature of existence, the claustrophobic nature of relationships and the deadly part chances plays in life, than the haunting plotline about István and his son. It is a repeated theme of Szalay’s fiction that major events happen “off-stage” and Flesh is unsettling in showing in such compelling detail the way that our lives are shaped by larger forces and historical events beyond our control.
The problematic nature of modern masculinity is a timely subject and Doyle praised the book for its topicality in capturing a certain type of man, one reared in an expectation that men don’t cry and that they have difficulty acknowledging grief. The book opens with adolescent István feeling bewildered by his sexual desires – it includes praise for his bravery as a soldier, and shows him being crushed when his step-son Thomas demeans him as a “primitive form of masculinity”.
David Szalay joins other Booker Prize winners such as Douglas Stuart, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel (Jonas Matyassy)
In an interview with Country & Town House in March, Szalay said: “I wanted the book to be a description, unflinching but also basically sympathetic, of what it’s like to inhabit a male body – or indeed to actually be a male body… I did want to explore what masculinity actually is, what it boils down to, and the conflict between István and Thomas was a way of doing that. Whether any of that constitutes a ‘defence’ of masculinity I don’t know. When I was writing the book, I tried not to think about these things in abstract terms.”
Doyle said that he had read Flesh three times in the process of making the final selection, adding that it is a book he would happily “sit and read it again tonight”. Flesh is a novel that merits more than one encounter. It is the most deserved Booker winner since Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain in 2020. I had strong misgivings about the previous two winners: Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2024) and Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023) but can see why Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, remarked that the judges “all agreed that David Szalay breaks new ground”.
This has been a good year for the Booker. I enjoyed Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi’s short story collection that claimed 2025’s International Prize and loved the decision to launch next year’s annual Children’s Booker Prize. Now, that year has been topped off with a main prize winner that is a startling, heartbreaking read about the strangeness of life.
Winning the Booker will bring a spike in sales for Szalay and introduce many new readers to the deceptively plain, stark prose of Flesh – and its superb dialogue. Szalay makes every word count; even the spaces around key passages deliver their own devastating message. Doyle described István as a “man of few words”, joking that portraying taciturn characters “didn’t do Clint Eastwood’s career any harm”. The portrait of István will not do Szalay’s career any harm either. When he cashes the mighty Booker cheque, he will have earned every last fistful of dollars.
‘Flesh’ by David Szalay is published by Jonathan Cape, £18.99
