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If the first thing you think when you finish a book is, “How did he do that!?��, you can be sure the author has pulled off something remarkable. I’ve long admired Szalay’s style and enjoyed his previous novels, but in his latest, the medium somehow IS the message. With spare, straightforward prose, and dialogue laconic in the extreme, Szalay portrays István, from age 15 to about 65. What he undergoes during that half-century is out-of-the ordinary, yet his story is, at bottom, about our common human experience. Physical and emotional, personal and geopolitical, it examines our bodies�� interface between our inner selves and the outer world. While Szalay has a quietly goofy humor that just tickled me, he also brought me to tears. But it wasn’t distress I was feeling, it was catharsis. And I realized that’s exactly what I’ve been needing these days.



P.S. I know it’s early, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Flesh was a Booker nominee. It’s definitely going to be on my personal 2025 Top Ten.