Shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2025
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.
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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.
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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.