Flesh

Summary

Fifteen-year-old István, growing up in a quiet Hungarian town, enters a clandestine affair with an older married woman that he barely understands, setting in motion a life shaped by desire, status, and unspoken grief. As the novel traces him from adolescence through army service and into the company of London's super-rich, Szalay writes in an unusually spare register, using silence and white space as much as words. The result is a portrait of masculinity and embodied experience told largely through what is withheld.