Flesh by David Szalay – Dua’s Monthly Read for October – is a spare and tense novel that follows István from a shy and awkward teenager in Hungary to his unexpected entry into London’s super rich set. Told through a series of episodic chapters, David has described it as “a short story collection hiding within a novel”. With five other books under his belt, there is plenty more to discover in his work – from sharp short stories to novels that draw on his experience as a telesales exec in London and his dual British-Hungarian heritage.
Taken together, his writing probes class, identity and belonging with rare precision – making Flesh not just a compelling entry point, but a perfect invitation into one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction right now. Here’s what you can dive into next...
London And The South-East, 2009
David’s debut novel is set in the world of a telephone salesman. It lifts the curtain on a materialistic and boozy environment. Paul Rainey is a 40-year-old functioning alcoholic on anti-anxiety medication who braves the London commute every day from Hove. It’s a sharp satire of the dark arts of trade telesales.
The Innocent, 2010
In his second novel, David turns his attention to the legacy of Stalin in a thriller that has been compared in craft to John Le Carre. In 1948, Aleksandr, a major in the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic in Russia to investigate one of the patients there. The patient is a man long presumed dead – a now severely incapacitated veteran of the Second World War, who seems unable to remember any of his past. Twenty four years later, Aleksandr is haunted by the case. With his Stalinist faith under threat as the Cold War recedes, he interrogates his memories and the effect the case had on himself and on those he loved most.
Spring, 2012
Praised for the precision and poise of the prose, Spring is a novel about money and love and betting everything on a single throw. James and Katherine meet at a wedding in London in 2006, towards the end of the dot-com boom. James is a man with a chequered past now living alone in a flat in Bloomsbury and running a shady horse-racing-tips operation; Katherine is separated from her husband and stuck in an interim job in a luxury hotel. They exchange phone numbers at the wedding, but from then on not much goes according to the script...
All That Man Is, 2016
Critics hotly debated whether All That Man Is constitutes a novel or a short story collection. When the writing is this good, who cares? Nine chapters, nine men, each of them at different stages of life and placed in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel. The book brings these separate lives together to show us men as they are – ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking and despicable; vital, pitiable, hilarious, and full of heartfelt longing. And as the years chase them down, the stakes become bewilderingly high in a piercing portrayal of 21st-century manhood.
Turbulence, 2018
Turbulence is structured as 12 interlinked stories, each of them presenting a brief glimpse into the life of a solitary air traveller. As each passenger brushes past another and their stories overlap, the baton is passed from one character to the next. These diverse protagonists circumnavigate the world in 12 plane journeys, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers and parents, children and siblings, or nobody at all.
There’s More – Delve Deeper Into Flesh With The Service95 Book Club...
WATCH Dua’s interview with David about the novel
LISTEN to their conversation on-the-go with our podcast
BOOKMARK the novels that inspire David Szalay’s writing
DISCOVER what to read next from the author’s back catalogue
LISTEN to David’s writing playlist to soundtrack your reading of Flesh
