Book Review — “Flesh: A Novel” by David Szalay

Flesh, winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, was the final fiction book I picked up this year. My first reaction was confusion. The opening is filled with graphic scenes, including disturbing sexual content involving a minor, and the prose feels almost aggressively plain. Much of the dialogue is monosyllabic, a rhythm of “Yeah,” “Yeah?” and “What do you mean?” that often forced me, as an audiobook listener, to complete the sentences myself.

Yet the book shifts. Midway through, Flesh reveals itself as a deep, unsettling study of István, a man who does not know how to name his feelings. The simplicity of the writing becomes a trapdoor into something far more powerful. You begin to feel the emotions he cannot articulate. Szalay’s restraint becomes precision.

By the time you encounter the passage in Chapter 10, the last chapter, where the narrator reflects on Helen and realises how profoundly she shaped his inner world, the novel opens into a meditation on the ways relationships form us without our understanding. It becomes clear why the Booker committee chose it. The emotional impact arrives quietly, then lands with remarkable force.

The book is sad, uncomfortable, and at times painful to read. I would not revisit it, but I do not regret reading it. The Audible narrator was excellent and elevated the experience. I ended the book wanting to know who could write with such stripped-down monotony, thinking him a man who is new to the English language and without extensive vocabulary, only to discover that Szalay is an accomplished writer with several novels behind him and translations in more than twenty languages.

Flesh is raw and bleak. If you can endure its harsh beginning, it rewards you with a profound story about the weight of a life and the shadow of the people who shape it.