PHILIPPA'S PICK

This is a dizzyingly moving book, describing the intimate details of a man's life with intricate delicacy. Women have been laid out before us like this in literature before, but seldom a man. A man remote from his actions, mostly unaware and occasionally experiencing stabs of insight. This book was outside my comfort zone, but I found it immensely moving without fanfare or drama. A surprise attack on the emotions.

- PD

A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.

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.

Hardcover | 368 pages | 6.25" x 9.29"