Flesh: A Novel 

Flesh — A Novel

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize | Finalist for the Kirkus Prize | Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence

From Booker Prize finalist and “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have” (Esquire), comes a “captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic” (The Baffler) novel about a man whose life veers off course due to unforeseen events.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet Hungarian apartment complex. Shy and new in town, he’s isolated and soon drawn into events that leave him a stranger to his peers, his mother, and himself. As the years pass, István is carried by the goodwill—or self-interest—of strangers, moving farther from the childhood and the defining tragedy that shaped him.

Flesh is a collection of intimate moments over decades, chronicling a man estranged from himself and the roles he’s asked to play. Shadowed by past tragedy and modern apathy, István’s life hurtles toward another reckoning. “Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it” (NPR), Flesh explores trauma, alienation, and humanity in an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight and unyielding pathos.

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