Flesh

Istvan is fifteen, living with his mother in a quiet apartment block in Hungary, friendless at school and almost entirely silent. A married neighbour takes an interest in him. What follows destroys the shape of his life, and the novel then follows him for decades: the army, London, money, other people's houses, a version of success he never asks for and cannot hold.

Szalay writes it in the sparest prose imaginable. Istvan barely speaks, and when he does he mostly says "okay". Whole years pass in a line break. The reader is given events and almost no interiority, and the effect is not coldness but the opposite: you find yourself supplying the feeling the book withholds, which makes it land far harder than description would.

It is a novel about a man to whom things happen, and about how a life can be assembled almost entirely out of other people's decisions. Sex and class run through all of it, and Szalay is unusually exact about how bodies and money actually work.

Be warned that the restraint is total. There is no lesson, no moment of self understanding, and the ending offers nothing that resembles comfort. Readers who need a character to grow will find this frustrating. Readers who can sit with a book that refuses to explain itself tend to find it the most quietly devastating thing they have read in years.

It is short and reads in two sittings, and it is worth knowing that the ordinary Booker experience of admiring a book from a distance does not apply here. People finish this one and then find they cannot stop thinking about a man who barely said a word to them.