Book Review: Flesh by David Szalay

Wani Nazir reviews this year’s Booker Prize winner, Flesh by David Szalay (Penguin Random House Ireland, 2025), calling it the quiet cartography of being.

David Szalay’s Flesh, which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2025, is one of the finest and most disturbing books ever written about embodiment. The book carries a line that ought to stay with you: “And 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.” The dialectic of privacy and disclosure, intimacy and estrangement is not just vital for István, Szalay’s protagonist; it also informs the novel’s intellectual architecture.

Like in Camus’s The Stranger, it’s not the order of events or even the size of them that makes them deep; it’s how clearly they are seen.  Szalay turns ordinary into existential. His style is calm and uninflected, taking no pose as narration takes place, seemingly breathing rather than telling. Flesh is more a tone poem than a story, an increasingly resonant act of listening — to the body itself, its muted acts of betrayal and, just as often, its whispered hum of simply being alive in an indifferent world.