David Szalay is the recent winner of the Booker Prize, an honour he received at a dinner in London on Monday, 10 November 2025 for his novel, Flesh.
The novel begins with Istvan as a lonely boy living in a block of apartments in Hungary with his mother. Istvan who has started at a new school his family having just moved into a new town, is having challenges making friends and when he eventually makes one, he loses him in no time for a reason so flimsy but common among teenagers.
Cut off his peers, he finds solace in the company of a neighour in the apartment opposite theirs, a woman old enough to be his mother. First, it is a kiss, a not-so-deep kiss. In no time, the kiss becomes French in nature. Within a short time, it stops being just a French kiss. She takes the whole of him in her mouth. And in no distant future, she has sex with him, a moment the author describes with the restraint of a writer who knows that the power of transgression lies not in its description but in its suggestion. The woman tells him, “I want to feel you inside me,” and in that line, the novel exposes its central tension: the hunger for touch and the moral decay that often accompanies it.
While the escapade is going on, Istvan’s mother holds a meeting with him. She expresses concern about his teachers’ complaint regarding his seeming distraction and his slipping grades. He insists all is well.
Meanwhile, he is also associating with the woman’s husband, who shares cigarettes with him from time to time. On one occasion, he asks: “What have you been up to?” His answer: “Nothing much.”
He avoids the woman after that. But she comes looking for him and they continue their exploration of each other’s bodies. When he is not with her, he feels miserable. The time they spend together is the highlight of his days and he is ever eager to leave school.
To the woman’s surprise, he starts saying he loves her and she cautions him against saying that because she says he is too young to understand what love means, too young to fall in love with a woman in her early forties who insists she loves the man she is cheating on.
As he protests her love for the man, she tells him the matter is too complex for his young brain to grasp. At this point, she breaks up with him and things fall apart. The only thing keeping him sane has slipped out of his control and the more he goes after her the more she shrugs him off.
Desperate and lovelorn, he goes knocking at her door and he is met by her husband, who tells him she is not around, but like someone who has lost his mind, he forces his way in and a fisticuff ensues and tragedy strikes.
Years later and unable to get a job, he joins the army. He leaves the military after five years, returns to Hungary a war hero and gets employed by a winery that once rejected him.
Bur although he has left the army, the army hasn’t left him and he soon begins seeing a therapist because of the emotional and traumatic scars he bears feom his time in Iraq, especially the death of Riki, his friend
Like a rolling stone, he leaves for London where ĺakes a job as a security man. With time he upgrades to being a private bodyguard, but a repeat of the Hungary transgression happens and with time, it unravels asb itusually does and what begins in sweetness ends in teeth gnashing.
By the time the novel ends, Istvan has morphed from the 15-year-old lonely boy of the beginning battling poverty to a full-grown man, who rises beyond lack and later falls into financial disaster.
Despite its bleakness, the author successfully steers Flesh away from moralising. The author simply observes – the way an artist with the mind of a sociologist might, or a confessor with no power to absolve
By making Istvan a man of few words, he succeeds in letting his flesh lead in decision-making. For this man who answers most enquiries with ‘yeah’, his body decides most times.
The novel raises questions about modern life, about desire, about money, about sex, about love, about work and around survival. It also tells of the class divide, especially the chasm between Europe’s rich and poor.
In raising these questions, the author refuses to nudge readers in a particular direction, handing them a blank cheque to decide for themselves who to either root for or reject.
He writes with a clarity that feels almost cruel. His sentences are spare, his silences heavy. What he achieves in Flesh is not just a story about forbidden desire, but a meditation on loneliness, on the strange bargains people, especially men, make to feel seen. The novel reminds us that the body, for all its promises of warmth, can also be the site of ruin.
With Flesh, Szalay confirms his reputation as a chronicler of contemporary disquiet. The book lingers like the aftertaste of something both sweet and unclean, a reminder that, often, the things we do for flesh are the things that undo us.
He delivers a disturbing, Intimate exploration of desire, loneliness, and the blurred boundaries between need and obsession.
***⁸Olukorede S. Yishau is the author of two novels: In The Name of Our Father and After The End; a collection of short stories: Vaults of Secrets; and a travel book: United Countries of America and Other Travel Tales. He is concluding work on his third novel. He lives in Houston, Texas.
