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.