Quizlit’s Book of the Month August 2025 is the outstanding Flesh by David Szalay. A hypnotic tale of estrangement and alienation, it captures both the utter strangeness and the possibilities, of modern life.
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Book of the Month August 2025
Flesh by David Szalay
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.
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.
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.
“The uncommonly gifted Hungarian-English novelist David Szalay… offers unvarnished scenes from a lonely, rags-to-riches life…Szalay’s simplicity is, like Hemingway’s, the fatty sort that resonates.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“As István’s life accumulates, [Flesh] only grows more captivating, more hypnotic, the question of freedom more charged… Instead of providing answers, Szalay poses inquiry, after inquiry, denying us what a lesser writer might feel compelled to provide…virtuosic.”
—The Baffler
“Reckoning, in a clear-eyed and reasonable way, with the reality of fate’s cold indifference…[Szalay is] a master of the flinty, spare sentence…at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language”
—The Guardian
“[Szalay] is one of a handful of writers who seem to have been born whole as novelists…A precise and relentless anatomist of male fecklessness, violence, opportunism, addiction, self-interest, and vanity.”
—LA Review of Books
“Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it, Szalay’s new novel reads a bit like an immigrant bildungsroman flavored with Albert Camus.”
—NPR
“Szalay’s cool, remote novel tells the rags-to-riches story of a lonely young man who grows up with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary. Among its primary subjects is male alienation: Even as the hero advances toward the redoubts of privilege, he feels like a bystander to his own life, with the detachment of a survivor. Yet Szalay lets us feel his inchoate longing for meaning and connection.”
—Editor’s Choice, New York Times Book Review
“I remain haunted by [this] book…with Flesh, Szalay has done something quite special.”
—Chicago Tribune
Also by David Szalay
What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a man here and now, in this place, in this time?
Szalay’s fourth novel offers a glimpse into the nine men’s lives. Men from across Europe, from different backgrounds; men like Gábor, staring out from a taxi window at a glossy London light heading into the city in search of money and Bérnard, stuck in a seedy hotel bar in Cyprus. Alien worlds and disparate lives collide as Szalay reveals a common struggle, a drive to perpetually move forward, to be successful and to find meaning amidst the chaos.
As the stories wind from the lives of feckless students and desperate emigres to an ambitious journalist and retired civil servant, Szalay gives a sense of whole lives lived out through snapshot glimpses. It amounts to a powerful and intimate portrait of male identity in the modern world and a biting critique of fractured society.
Twelve people on the move around planet Earth, twelve individual lives, each in turmoil, and each in some way touching the next. In this nuanced and deeply moving sequence, David Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the world in twelve plane journeys, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers and parents, children and siblings, or nobody at all.
Along the way, Szalay deftly depicts the ripple effect that, knowingly or otherwise, a person’s actions have on those around them, and invites us to consider our own place in the vast and delicately balanced network of human relationships that is the world we live in today.
If you enjoyed our Book of the Month August 2025, check out 5 Wonderful New Books for August 2025