When you read David Szalay’s Flesh, winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, don’t be fooled by its simple prose. Beneath that calm surface lies a complex, unsettling novel about exploitation, masculinity, class mobility, and the random forces that shape a human life. It’s a story that begins in silence and stays there – forcing the reader to lean in, to fill the gaps, to inhabit what isn’t said

Szalay’s writing is famously spare, but in Flesh, the plainness becomes something charged, even dangerous. The language mirrors its protagonist, István – a quiet, passive man whose life unfolds in fragments. His story begins with an act of abuse that teaches him passivity long before he understands what’s been taken from him. That early grooming by an older neighbour sets the tone for everything that follows: István moves through the world as someone shaped by others’ desires. His characteristic response – “yeah, okay” – carries more horror than any explicit confession. Each repetition becomes a tiny act of surrender

This restraint is what gives the novel its power. Because Szalay tells us so little about what István feels, we end up doing the work ourselves. We project meaning onto his silences, just as the people around him do. The reader becomes complicit – another presence shaping him, misunderstanding him, demanding coherence where none exists

The novel unfolds in a series of vignettes spanning decades: teenage years in Hungary, a prison sentence, military service, a stint as a bouncer, and, finally, the dizzying rise into London’s elite. The scenes are elliptical, separated by long gaps of unspoken time, but the pattern is always the same – István is acted upon more than he acts. His most decisive moments happen by chance: carrying groceries for a neighbour, hearing a cry from an alley, answering a question at the right time. The randomness of these events builds a quiet philosophy: our lives are less the sum of choices than of accidents

István’s ascent into wealth and status feels both miraculous and meaningless. He was supposed to stay forgotten – a man of the margins, anonymous among the post-Soviet working class. Instead, he finds himself surrounded by power and money and realises he belongs nowhere. The tragedy isn’t that he fails to change, but that he succeeds without becoming anyone at all. Szalay suggests that control is an illusion – that believing we direct our lives is a kind of arrogance

As István ages, his desires fade. His life becomes a sequence of impulses: hunger, sex, survival, routine. He moves through relationships as if underwater, responding to what others want from him but never naming what he wants for himself. Even love, when it comes late in life, feels accidental – a flicker of meaning he can’t sustain. For a moment, he wants something more, but the novel’s cruel truth remains: even the things we cherish most are beyond our control

What makes Flesh extraordinary is the continuity between these different versions of István – the boy, the soldier, the bouncer, the millionaire. Szalay shifts across time and class with astonishing fluidity, but the man remains recognisably the same: watchful, hollowed out, existing just beneath the surface of his own life. That hollowness becomes the emotional core of the novel. Without ever spelling it out, Szalay lets us feel the weight of shame, isolation, and the confusion of masculinity – the endless search for strength, purpose, and control that always dissolves on contact with reality

By the end, what lingers isn’t a plot or a moral but a feeling – that we’ve glimpsed something raw and recognisable about human existence. Flesh captures how we drift through the world half-aware, half-alive, convinced of our agency while constantly shaped by the desires and accidents around us

Szalay’s triumph is that he makes this quiet despair beautiful. He finds poetry in plainness, depth in stillness, and meaning in the gaps between words. Flesh is a haunting, clear-eyed portrait of a man – and, by extension, of all of us – moving blindly through a life that was never truly ours to command

A worthy and devastating winner of the Booker Prize