Flesh

'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 Istvn 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 mothers age as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvn himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first centurys tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of Londons 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. 'Its been a long time since Ive 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