Flesh

LoveReading Says

LoveReading Literary Pick of the Month - April 2025

At once direct, understated and emphatic, David Szalay’s Flesh is a brilliantly brutal novel about a young man’s life journey from a terrible incident in his lonely teenage years, through to serving in the army, and drifting through a succession of circumstances that see him rise, in a way, and fall, in a big way, throughout his adult life.

“He doesn’t know what it’s like for other people. He only has his own experience.” So the author sums up his protagonist, István, near the start of a remarkable novel that subsequently shows how István’s life experiences barely inform the twists and turns his life takes. Rather, he remains forever subject to the ebbs and flows of tides beyond his control. 

We first meet István as a fifteen-year-old loner who lives with his mother in an apartment block in Hungary. After drifting apart from his sole friend, his encounters with a much older married woman lead to sexual awakenings, and an accidental violent incident that shapes his next years. Seeing few other opportunities, he signs up to the army, leaves after a five-year stint in Iraq, and drifts back to his mother’s town: “He thinks of the job at the winery as a very temporary thing, something he will do for a few months maybe, just until he finds something else.

Except that he isn’t actually trying to find anything else. It’s like he’s waiting for something else to find him. Or not even that. He isn’t really thinking about the future at all.”

And so, this drifting path continues when one job leads to another, when one kind of relationship morphs into another kind of relationship, and István finds himself in the circle of London’s super-wealthy elite, before a great unravelling.

Consummately compelling, Flesh is a cuttingly moving story of transformations, and accidents (happy and otherwise) that lays bare cold-blooded truths about the human condition, and how life is barely within our grasp or control. I couldn’t put it down.

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
More reviews by Joanne Owen

About Flesh

From Booker-shortlisted author David Szalay, comes a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour - a married woman close to his mother's age - as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century's tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London's super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

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