Flesh A Novel

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize | Finalist for the Kirkus Prize

From a writer Esquire calls “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have” comes a novel that lingers long after the final page — quiet, devastating, and impossible to put down.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a modest Hungarian apartment complex, a shy outsider adrift from the social rituals of his classmates. A series of unforeseen events leaves him forever estranged — from his peers, his mother, and himself. What follows is a life carried forward by the goodwill and self-interest of strangers, tracing a rocky trajectory that carries him further and further from the defining moments of his youth.

Flesh is a collection of intimate moments spanning decades — a portrait of a man at odds with himself, shadowed by unresolved trauma and the quiet violence of an ever-globalizing Europe. “Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it,” writes NPR. The Baffler calls it “captivating… hypnotic… virtuosic.”

This is literary fiction at its most precise and most humane — a novel about the roles we are asked to play, the selves we lose along the way, and the imperceptible contours that shape a life.

• Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize
• Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
• Acclaimed by NPR, The Baffler, and Esquire

The kind of novel you’ll want to press into someone else’s hands the moment you finish. We have a feeling it’ll find a permanent spot on your shelf.

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