Canadian-born, Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has won the Booker Prize for his novel, Flesh. It follows the eventful life of one Hungarian, István, from his teen years to middle age.

The novel begins when István, aged 15, and his mother move to a new town — “it’s not an easy age to do that.” Although he struggles to make friends, he hangs out with “another solitary individual” who asks him if he’s “ever done it.” This new friend sets him up with “a girl” but nothing happens. István is confused by this and his blank passivity sets the tone for the novel and his life.

Within only a few pages, an older woman neighbour, for whom he’s undertaking chores at the behest of his mother, grooms him into a sexual relationship. It ends in tragedy when he falls in love with her and pushes her husband down the stairs, to his death.

Put crudely, István is motivated by sex and acts with violence. But this misrepresents the novel and its power. Rather than presenting a cliche of brute manhood, Szalay portrays a man who is simply responsive to the world around him. István’s emotions and tragedies are often left out of the third-person storytelling, as if they cannot be explained. Other men in the novel are equally uncommunicative.

It’s a propulsive novel that’s quite quick to read because sparse dialogue is interspersed with István’s blank thoughts. He responds to declarations of love and desire with a mere “OK” or acknowledgement that: “He hadn’t actually known what he was about to say.” This is what is so singular about the storytelling of Flesh; it is spare rather than voluptuous, trimmed to the bone rather than fleshy.

David Szalay’s Flesh, which has won the Booker Prize this year, is a deeply affecting novel about masculinity

There are jumps between chapters. We don’t hear about István’s time in a young offenders’ institution or anything at all about his father, for example. But we learn, during an exit interview from the army, that he’s “a brave man” and it’s clear that he is attractive to women, who perhaps perceive his taciturnity as masculine. We don’t hear what they think either.

Flesh wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test — a criteria for films that stipulates they should feature at least two named women who have a conversation about something other than a man. The novel is entirely focused on István’s point of view and all the women, apart from his mother, are those he chances upon — other men’s wives, the nanny employed by the family he works for — and then has a sexual relationship with. Sex comes his way; women try and fail to get him to talk.

Good fortune arrives along with the tragedies. István moves to London, working as a bouncer until, in another chance encounter and moment of fearlessness, he helps a man who wishes to repay this act. He offers to employ him in his private security agency. Like the women in the novel, men are also eager to exploit István’s physicality.

This man grooms him for “higher-end work”, by paying for expensive suits and the necessary training courses, which István finds populated half by “foreigners, mainly from Eastern Europe.” It’s the start of his ascent into wealthy, sometimes corrupt, London society.

Flesh then refers to the way István is seen, as only a body, a member of the new working classes, whose lives are defined by precarity. Kept outside, overhearing only his bare responses — “OK” — readers become complicit in this failure to consider all that man is. And it is precisely this innovative, spare narration that makes the novel so deeply affecting.

The writer is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 23rd, 2025