Booker Prize 2025: Why David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’ is a uniquely original winner
David Szalay’s masterful novel, 'Flesh', shows it is possible to write cutting-edge, experimental fiction without losing the reader
David Szalay’s Flesh, which won the Booker Prize 2025 on Monday, was the first of the six titles I had picked up from the shortlist to read this year. It immediately drew me in—not because it has a singularly gripping plot, but rather, for the exact opposite reason. Flesh is what one may call an anti-novel. It ostensibly plays by the rules of narrative fiction but, in fact, merely puts flesh and bones over a mysterious skeleton. Szalay cultivates a deliberately styleless style with no signposts to lead the reader to this framework or decode the message it hides.
István, the protagonist of Flesh, is a character without any exceptional qualities—as plain as they come. He is a misfit in Hungary, where he grows up. Later, in England, where he spends several of his adult years, he stays just as unmoored despite his shifting fortunes. All through the ups and downs of his life, István remains the proverbial blank slate, where people and places leave their imprints. His mind is numb to the vagaries of existence.
As a 15-year-old, he has an affair with an older neighbour, an episode that makes the reader deeply uncomfortable, particularly due to Szalay’s clinically descriptive style in this section. It ends in tragedy, after which István joins the army. He lives through violence and suffering without losing his equanimity. Then, fortuitously, he breaks through the barriers of class and gets a taste of wealth in London. A few good years later, his luck runs out again, but not his poise. As a reviewer wrote in The Guardian, István is a mix of Meursault from Camus’ The Stranger and Forrest Gump, from the eponymous movie.
Flesh is a masterpiece of understatement, not because its main character is chronically odd and obtuse. Szalay makes the reader work hard, unlike, say, Kiran Desai, also shortlisted for the prize, whose novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, is a breeze, as easy to binge on as a Netflix series, despite its 700-odd pages. Or, say, Katie Kitamura’s shortlisted novel Audition, a slim but inspired tale of an actor forced to confront the treacherous depths of her profession through an intense life experience.
Having been on the jury of multiple literary prizes, I can empathize with the dilemma the Booker judges faced this year. All the six shortlisted titles were uniquely powerful. The other three nominees—Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, Susan Choi’s Flashlight and Ben Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives—grapple intensely with the Big Questions of life, death, love, marriage, identity, parenthood, and more. But none of them come close to Flesh in terms of originality.
Szalay’s deft control over language, especially in the long yet laconic exchanges between his characters, shows that it is possible to write a cutting-edge, experimental novel without losing the reader of mainstream fiction. As a compulsive page-turner, Flesh pushes the scope of the philosophical novel by hiding its message between the lines, in everything that remains unsaid, instead of giving over to voluble explanations.
By refusing to give the reader access to the inner life of his character, Szalay sets up a challenge that is unyielding while remaining inviting, given the book’s readability. The novel is a masterclass in the art of ‘show, don’t tell’, its limpid style a call to the reader to race through its pages as well as a ploy to make them pause, reread, attend, and keep thinking, long after István’s story is over.
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