{"id":3670,"date":"2025-07-26T01:21:49","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T01:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=3670"},"modified":"2025-07-26T01:21:49","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T01:21:49","slug":"book-of-the-month-august-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=3670","title":{"rendered":"Book of the Month August 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quizlit\u2019s Book of the Month August 2025 is the outstanding Flesh by David Szalay<\/a>. A hypnotic tale of estrangement and alienation, it captures both the utter strangeness and the possibilities, of modern life.<\/p>\n

This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.<\/em><\/p>\n

Book of the Month August 2025<\/h2>\n

Flesh by David Szalay<\/h2>\n
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Buy Now<\/strong>: Amazon<\/a> | AbeBooks<\/a><\/p>\n

Fifteen-year-old Istv\u00e1n 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 \u2013 a married woman close to his mother\u2019s age \u2013 as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istv\u00e1n himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.<\/p>\n

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century\u2019s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London\u2019s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe uncommonly gifted Hungarian-English novelist David Szalay\u2026 offers unvarnished scenes from a lonely, rags-to-riches life\u2026Szalay\u2019s simplicity is, like Hemingway\u2019s, the fatty sort that resonates.\u201d
\u2014The New York Times Book Review<\/p>\n

\u201cAs Istv\u00e1n\u2019s life accumulates, [Flesh] only grows more captivating, more hypnotic, the question of freedom more charged\u2026 Instead of providing answers, Szalay poses inquiry, after inquiry, denying us what a lesser writer might feel compelled to provide\u2026virtuosic.\u201d
\u2014The Baffler<\/p>\n

\u201cReckoning, in a clear-eyed and reasonable way, with the reality of fate\u2019s cold indifference\u2026[Szalay is] a master of the flinty, spare sentence\u2026at 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\u201d
\u2014The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201c[Szalay] is one of a handful of writers who seem to have been born whole as novelists\u2026A precise and relentless anatomist of male fecklessness, violence, opportunism, addiction, self-interest, and vanity.\u201d
\u2014LA Review of Books<\/p>\n

\u201cSpare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it, Szalay\u2019s new novel reads a bit like an immigrant bildungsroman flavored with Albert Camus<\/a>.\u201d
\u2014NPR<\/p>\n

\u201cSzalay\u2019s 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.\u201d
\u2014Editor\u2019s Choice, New York Times Book Review<\/p>\n

\u201cI remain haunted by [this] book\u2026with Flesh, Szalay has done something quite special.\u201d
\u2014Chicago Tribune<\/p>\n

Also by David Szalay<\/h2>\n
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Buy Now<\/strong>: Amazon<\/a> | AbeBooks<\/a><\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Szalay\u2019s fourth novel offers a glimpse into the nine men\u2019s lives. Men from across Europe, from different backgrounds; men like G\u00e1bor, staring out from a taxi window at a glossy London light heading into the city in search of money and B\u00e9rnard, 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. <\/p>\n

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Buy Now<\/strong>: Amazon<\/a> | AbeBooks<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Along the way, Szalay deftly depicts the ripple effect that, knowingly or otherwise, a person\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

If you enjoyed our Book of the Month August 2025, check out 5 Wonderful New Books for August 2025<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quizlit\u2019s 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. This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Book of the Month August […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3671,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}