No one mispronounces “Szalay”. All the journalists bustling in and out of the junket have planned carefully ahead (imagine them, and imagine me too, rewinding and pre-mouthing). Or so the bearer of that jagged surname tells me. They’ve had to, since the Booker prize dinner, since the Booker statuette (a decidedly non-literary production of a nymph carrying a giant bowl), since the author’s sudden and permanent migration from literary smalltown to the commercial big city. It’s Suh-loy, thank you very much, and the book is called Flesh.
Szalay has visited this territory before – his earlier novel, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. And he seems relaxed at the eye of the PR storm, steady and unshaven, dressed in a comfy quarter-zip jumper. He has a powerful novelistic glower (browed, perceptive), and what I unforgivably think of as a “novelistic” accent (baritone, Oxford). But otherwise, he seems unburdened by the transition from the 2013 Granta Best of Young British Novelists to – surely, by this weekend – Sunday Times bestseller.
But the burdening of his victory with weight and interpretation is already well underway. And, as is generally the case in literary journalism these days, the task has fallen to columnists instead of critics, who like to play a sort of political Buckaroo with the novels that come their way. In this case, they have alighted on the “lost boys” question, the “bad lads” conundrum. So: Szalay’s victory marks “triumph of male-focused literary fiction”. Flesh “seems to incarnate the masculine struggle with modernity”. The novel “seems likely to appeal to that elusive creature, the 21st-century male reader of novels”. Or actually – because there wouldn’t be a discourse without a debate – “David Szalay’s Flesh isn’t here to save the lit bros.”
Szalay is clearly uncomfortable about the way Flesh has been planted at the middle of a series of concentric debates about male novelists, male reading, male conditioning and male crisis. “I don’t see it even primarily as a book about masculinity,” he tells me. “I’m trying to describe male behaviour in as realistic way as a I can, I guess,” he says. “But I don’t really see that as the main point.” Coming from the author of a book titled All That Man Is – which got him onto the Booker shortlist for the first time, in 2016 – this might seem evasive. But Flesh is a more elusive work than the polemicists might hope for, and a much finer novel for it.
Flesh is the story of István. He’s a 15-year-old living with his mother in an unnamed town in Hungary. He’s shy and awkward and starting to discover girls, but then his neighbour, a woman in her early forties, discovers him. She seduces or grooms him into a sexual relationship (motives and causes are never entirely settled in this novel). This relationship, and the jealousies it arouses, lead István into an altercation with the neighbour’s husband on the stairwell of their block of flats, during which the husband falls and is killed.
This episode frames the rest of István’s life, sending him to a young offenders’ institution, to the Hungarian army in Iraq (that original “coalition of the willing”), to emigrate to England, and ultimately to become a security guard for London’s super-rich – before joining the ranks of the super-rich himself. And with its transgressive romance, claustrophobic setting and background violence, that opening chapter also supplies the themes of István’s life. But the novel isn’t all fucks and fights – Istvan is also pushed by the tides of European migration, pulled by the temptations of the upper-class. “He’s a Hungarian in England, so that’s part of the picture too,” Szalay tells me. “And part of the book is a kind of rags to riches story.”
But if it sounds like a busy life, Flesh is not a busy novel. Most of the book blinks forward in descriptive one-line paragraphs: “There’s a spa in the hotel that they sometimes use. / There’s a nice pool.” The dialogue is similarly pared down to a screenplay of monosyllables. You know Szalay really has something to say when he unleashes the comma, when he tumbles into a long, interior sentence. This is István, later in life, reflecting on his pubescent years:
“… all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific to you…”
After hundreds of pages of narrative accumulation, these moments soar. I ask Szalay whether puberty, and specifically István’s disturbed puberty, is the central theme of the novel. “He’s attracted to transgressive relationships,” Szalay says, “and the central relationship of the book – which I don’t want to go into lest we spoil it – has, in a very different way, at least initially, a power dynamic that resembles the power dynamic of that early adolescent affair in that the much older woman is the one in control and the one with power.”
But Szalay resists hypotheses, and even categorisation. His interest in manhood is searching, not grotesque. He is not familiar, for instance, with the viral recent Harper’s article “The Goon Squad”, or “gooning” itself (a growing masturbatory subculture). He refers to journalistic inquiries on the matter as “an almost cartoon-like discussion, which is very much based on ghoulish figures”. After we speak about the apparently vexed relationship between men and their feelings, he goes on to say: “I think that part of the point of a novel, novels generally, is that they are able to talk about these things with greater subtlety and in higher resolution than a public debate carried on in a media or political context.”
One public figure notoriously bad at articulating feelings – his and the country’s – is the Prime Minister, who also claims not to have a favourite novel. “He should be reading Flesh,” Szalay chuckles. “I don’t know the immediate context, but do you think he thinks it would be politically disadvantageous to him to talk about his favourite novel?”
I answer that at one time Starmer did cite James Kelman’s 1989 novel A Disaffection. Szalay goes on: “This is all a bit sad, because if he feels that talking about his favourite novel might be politically disadvantageous, then that’s a bad state of affairs.” Because there should be no division between robust masculine leadership and reading novels? “Absolutely, and nor should there be some kind of thing that reading novels is some very middle-class, metropolitan, elitist thing, which might also be something on his mind when he takes that decision to shy away from that question.”
It’s no surprise Szalay isn’t familiar with Starmer’s willed illiteracy: he bade farewell to England some time ago, and his career has been characterised by emigration. His first novel, London and the South East (2008), is a funny, clever and distinctly English comic novel, full of booze, fags and hangover set-pieces. And it is written in what Szalay describes to me as a “more flamboyant, noisier, lusher” way than Flesh. It has more venom, presenting what he calls an “almost grotesquely unflattering picture of certain aspects of London life”. Since then, his prose has sharpened, and his canvas broadened: All That Man Is and its follow-up Turbulence (2018) are European, if not simply international books. Literary emigration has come with geographic emigration; Szalay relocated to Hungary in 2009, and then in recent years to Vienna.
It’s clearly a life that’s stretched his personhood as much as his writing. I ask if he considers himself an English novelist, in style if not location. “I think in my first few books, you could ask that and I would probably have said yes quite straightforwardly. But now… I can’t really imagine writing a novel that’s only set in England, even London, because I’ve lost the very intimate connection with a place that you can only have by actually living there,” he says. “I sort of think of myself as a ‘European novelist’ now, but I don’t know if that even exists.”
I point out that the phrase means a lot more now than it did in 2009. “Absolutely – the meaning is sharpened. I felt very comfortable before Brexit – when London had this status as a sort of unofficial capital of Europe, it was the great metropolis of the continent, people from all over Europe would come here in the way that people from all over America wash up in New York, young people seeking to make their way in life – and I was very comfortable with that picture of London. If that still existed, I would still feel comfortable with it.”
That’s not to say he’s left the comic style behind for good. “I’m working on something now – obviously Flesh was finished about two years ago – I’ve started something else since then and it’s going back towards a richer prose texture than Flesh.” And, he adds, “I really enjoy writing things that are funny. That is just a very enjoyable thing to do… I hope to write more amusing books in the future too.”
[Further reading: Sarah Hall: “I wanted readers to experience dystopia”]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes