In a year crowded with louder, more ambitious novels, this slim and disciplined book had stayed largely under the radar.
And perhaps that was the point. Its triumph suggests a shift in what readers crave: less spectacle, more silence; less performance, more presence.
A huge congratulations to the author, David Szalay.
(From The Booker Prize 2025 HP)
A body that remembers
Flesh follows István, a man who drifts from a housing estate in Hungary to the world of London’s ultra-rich.
The story begins with a violent episode in his youth, then traces his life through army service, migration, and a series of detached relationships. One might say very suitable Bookerish topic.
The prose is spare to the point of severity.
Whole pages are left blank — grief rendered not as confession, but as absence.
Szalay has said he wanted to write about “what it’s like to be a living body in the world.”
Before we are thinkers or citizens, we are physical beings: breathing, ageing, carrying memory in our bones.
Whatever divides us — class, language, nation — we share this fact of embodiment.
In that sense, Flesh is less a story than a meditation on existence itself.
The discipline of feeling
The novel’s power lies in its restraint.
István is neither heroic nor tragic. He observes, endures, adapts.
Roddy Doyle, chair of the Booker panel, saw in him a familiar kind of man — one raised never to cry, never to explain.
The book peers behind that mask, showing the quiet cost of composure.
Emotion, held too tightly, turns into distance; discipline becomes exile from one’s own heart.
And yet Szalay never moralizes. He allows the silence to speak for itself.
That moral stillness is what makes Flesh so arresting.
It asks a question many modern novels evade:
What does it mean to live without display, without constant self-narration?
In an age where emotion is often broadcast, Szalay restores dignity to interiority.
Meaning through omission
What captivated the judges most was how Flesh uses absence.
Doyle praised the way “so much is revealed without us being aware of it being revealed.”
Dialogue fades. Explanation dissolves.
The book’s rhythm is built from ellipsis — from what remains unsaid.
In that refusal to explain, Szalay achieves something rare: intimacy without exposure.
He writes with the confidence of someone who trusts the reader to meet him halfway.
The result feels more like sculpture than storytelling — meaning carved from silence, not speech.
At a time when prose often competes for attention, Flesh rewards those who can sit with stillness.
A European life
Szalay conceived the novel between Hungary and England, living “very much between the two countries.”
He wanted a story with “a Hungarian end and an English end.”
Through István’s movements, Flesh becomes a portrait of Europe itself — its migrations, its inequalities, its uneasy unity.
It captures what it means to live between systems, always slightly translated, never entirely at home.
That geography of in-betweenness mirrors our era of movement and fracture — one man’s path standing in for a continent’s restlessness.
Craft and routine
In interviews, Szalay speaks with the humility of a craftsman.
He writes at six in the morning, at a desk, with silence and a cup of coffee —
a practice measured not by productivity but by focus.
Among the books that shaped him are Animal Farm, Rabbit, Run, and The Line of Beauty — works that turn the ordinary into moral terrain.
He rereads Samuel Pepys’s diaries endlessly, finding in their details a strange continuity with modern life.
That lineage explains Flesh’s quiet authority:
the realism of Orwell, the precision of Updike, and the fascination with the daily that runs through Pepys’s seventeenth-century London.
Szalay belongs to that tradition of writers who remind us that attention itself can be radical.
The return of stillness
What does it mean that such a book has won the Booker Prize today?
Perhaps it signals a recalibration of values — a reminder that literature need not compete with noise.
After years of speed and irony, we are drawn again to writing that slows us down.
Flesh doesn’t demand attention; it earns it.
It whispers rather than argues, and yet its whisper carries farther than most shouts.
In Szalay’s world, to write is to observe; to observe is to care.
He turns the simple act of noticing — a gesture, a pause, a body shifting in space — into moral art.
There are no epiphanies, no resolutions.
Only the enduring fact of being alive, and the strange tenderness that comes with seeing it clearly.
The quiet prize
The judges called Flesh “spare, disciplined, urgent, honest and heartbreaking.”
They reached their decision unanimously.
That unanimity feels symbolic: a collective recognition that literature’s future may depend not on invention, but on integrity.
Szalay’s win is a victory for the unhurried mind — for writers who choose depth over display, for readers who still value the weight of attention.
In the end, Flesh feels less like a novel than a mirror.
It reflects what we hide as much as what we show.
It reminds us that restraint can be a form of courage, and that silence, when shaped with care, can speak louder than certainty.
When a quiet book wins the loudest prize in literature, it tells us something hopeful:
that even now, amid the churn of content and commentary, there is still room for work that breathes — for art that listens before it speaks. ■