'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey
'A revelatory novel' Sunday Times
‘So brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls
'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant' Tessa Hadley
At first there seems to be no reason to deny the body what it wants, whenever it wants it.
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 asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.
'It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one ... So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer
A ‘Best Book of 2025’ in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail