David Szalay

**A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice** From the acclaimed, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of All That Man Is, a stunning, virtuosic novel about twelve people, mostly strangers, and the surprising ripple effect each one has on the life of the next as they cross paths while in transit around the world. A woman strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to her on a plane after some turbulence. He returns home to tragic news that has also impacted another stranger, a shaken pilot on his way to another continent who seeks comfort from a journalist he meets that night. Her life shifts subtly as well, before she heads to the airport on an assignment that will shift more lives in turn. In this wondrous, profoundly moving novel, Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the planet in twelve flights, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers or estranged siblings, aging parents, baby grandchildren, or nobody at all. Along the way, they experience the full range of human emotions from loneliness to love and, knowingly or otherwise, change each other in one brief, electrifying interaction after the next. Written with magic and economy and beautifully exploring the delicate, crisscrossed nature of relationships today, Turbulence is a dazzling portrait of the interconnectedness of the modern world.

A Novel

Turbulence

Flesh

A Spectator / New Statesman / Daily Telegraph / Guardian / Times Literary Supplement / Observer Book of the Year SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE Winner of the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize Nine men. Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving - in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel - to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing an arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, All That Man Is 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 this piercing portrayal of 21st-century manhood.

All That Man Is

"Teenaged Istvâan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor--a married woman close to his mother's age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands--as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvâan himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident thatleaves a man dead. What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees Istvâan emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London's billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, Istvâan is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant "success story," brightened by moments of sensitivity, softness, and Szalay's keen observation"--

A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)

WINNER OF THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE AND A NATIONAL BESTSELLER Finalist for the Kirkus Prize | Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence From “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have” (Esquire), a “captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic” (The Baffler) novel about a man whose life veers off course due to a series of unforeseen circumstances. Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined. A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself—estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy. “Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it” (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.

London and the South-East

The U.S. debut of leading U.K. author David Szalay, named one of The Daily Telegraph's twenty best British novelists under forty James is a man with a checkered past--sporadic entrepreneur, one-time film producer, almost a dot-com millionaire--now alone in a flat in Bloomsbury, running a shady horse-racing-tips operation. Katherine is a manager at a luxury hotel, a job she'd intended to leave years ago, and is separated from her husband. The novel unfolds in 2006, at the end of the money-for-nothing years, as a chance meeting leads to an awkward tryst and James tries to make sense of a relationship where "no" means "maybe" and a "yes" can never be taken for granted. David Szalay builds a novel of immense resonance as he cycles though perspectives that add layers of depth to the hesitations, missteps, and tensions as James tries to win Katherine. James's other pursuit is money, and Spring follows his investments and schemes, from a half share in a thoroughbred to a suit-and-tie day job he's taken to pay the bills. Spring is a sharply tuned novel so nuanced and precise in its psychology that it establishes Szalay as a major talent.

Spring

Here are nine men. Each of them is at a different stage in life, each of them is away from home, and each of them is striving - in the suburbs of Prague, in an over-developed Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a crap Cypriot hotel - to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now. Vibrating with detail and intelligence, pathos and surprise, All That Man Is is a portrait of contemporary manhood, contemporary Europe and contemporary life from a British writer of supreme gifts - the master of a new kind of realism.

All that man is

Nove uomini, in diverse età della vita, dall'adolescenza alla vecchiaia. Un continente, l'Europa oggi – da Cipro alla Croazia, dalle Fiandre alla Svizzera –, fotografato in una luce cruda, quasi senza ombre. I nove fanno quasi tutte le cose che i maschi sono soliti fare: inseguono donne, le abbandonano, tentano un affare improbabile, cercano un luogo dove vivere un esilio decente, chiacchierano, sognano un'altra vita. E se a ogni capitolo tutto – protagonista, ambiente, atmosfera – cambia, fin dal primo stacco le nove storie sembrano una sola. All'inizio stentiamo a riconoscerlo, il paesaggio che David Szalay ci costringe a esplorare, finché, per ogni lettore in un punto diverso, ciò che abbiamo davanti si rivela per quel che è, in tutta la sua perturbante evidenza: il nostro tempo, quello che viviamo ogni giorno, in forma di romanzo.

Tutto quello che è un uomo

**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025** 'A masterpiece, told with virtuosic economy... Pure brilliance from the first to the (devastating) last sentence’ India Knight 'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey 'Spare, visceral, urgent, compelling. This book doesn't f**k around' Gary Stevenson ‘So brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls Through chance, luck and choice, one man’s life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London – in this captivating new novel about the forces that make and break our lives Fifteen-year-old István 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 mother’s age – as his only companion. As these encounters shift into a clandestine relationship, István’s life spirals out of control. Years later, rising through the ranks from the army to the elite circles of London's super-rich, he navigates the twenty-first century's tides of money and power. Torn between love, intimacy, status, and wealth, his newfound riches threaten to undo him completely. ‘How do I get out of a reading slump? This is the book to do that’ Rhianna Dhillon, BBC Radio 4 'A revelatory novel' Sunday Times 'So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer ‘Refreshing, illuminating and true’ Financial Times 'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant' Tessa Hadley 'One of the year’s best novels to date' Daily Mail ‘Utterly engrossing and I read it all in a day’ 5* reader review ‘I was hooked and tried to read this book with any spare moment that I had' 5* reader review A ‘Best Book of 2025’ in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025

This is the story of Paul Rainey, an ad salesman with Park Lane Publications Ltd. Perceiving dimly through a fog of psychoactive substances his dissatisfaction with his life - professional, sexual, weekends, the lot - he only wishes there was something he was able to do about it. And 'something' seems to fall into his lap when a meeting with an old friend and fellow salesman, Eddy Jaw, leads to the offer of a new job. Unfortunately, this offer turns out to be as misleading as Paul's patter, and the total transformation it precipitates in his life, and the life of his family, very much more peculiar than he would ever have thought possible. Critics often lament that the world of work is rarely treated in British fiction. London and the South-East answers that need triumphantly.

Tudo o Que Um Homem É

Turbolenza

It is spring 1948 and Aleksandr, a major in the MGB - forerunner of the KGB - is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic in the Ural mountains to investigate one of the patients there, Anatoly Yudin, a man long presumed dead, once a famous pianist, now a severely incapacitated veteran of the Second World War...Twenty-four years later, in the summer of 1972 - the summer of Nixon's visit to Moscow, of the Fischer-Spassky chess match, of the Munich Olympics and their hostage crisis - the Cold War is entering detente, and the values that shaped Aleksandr's life are starting to dissolve into uncertainty. Haunted by the events of the past, and with his Stalinist faith once more under threat, he interrogates his memories of the Yudin case, and tries to trace its effects on himself, and on those he loved most. We know the horrors of the police state and the purges, but The Innocent takes us on a journey into the everyday of Communist Russia, bringing alive the intensely personal consequences of a regime, the power of institutions and ideologies to define a life - to crush it or invest it with meaning. Following on from the success of his prize-winning debut, David Szalay returns with a searing work of acute realism and bleak beauty, the breathtaking next stage of a major literary career.

The Innocent

Secondo studi recenti, una conseguenza imprevista del riscaldamento globale sarebbero turbolenze molto più frequenti rispetto al passato, e soprattutto imprevedibili. Nel mondo fisico può essere vero oppure no, ma in questo romanzo di David Szalay i dodici personaggi che da un capitolo all’altro si passano il testimone non sanno davvero cosa potrà succedere, fra il terminal delle partenze e quello degli arrivi, né che esito avrà il loro disperato tentativo di fuga. E se i maschi di «Tutto quello che è un uomo» avevano ancora un continente di terra e acqua in cui tentare di mimetizzarsi, sfuggendo alle proprie catastrofi interiori, gli uomini e le donne di «Turbolenza» vivono in aria – come, sempre più spesso, molti di noi. E, come molti di noi, sanno che dall’aria non si può sperare di proteggersi: nell’aria, soprattutto, non si può sperare di nascondersi.

**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025** 'A masterpiece, told with virtuosic economy... Pure brilliance from the first to the (devastating) last sentence' India Knight 'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey 'Spare, visceral, urgent, compelling. This book doesn't f**k around' Gary Stevenson 'So brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls Through chance, luck and choice, one man's life takes him from a modest apartment in Hungary to the elite society of London - in this captivating new novel about the forces that make and break our lives Fifteen-year-old István 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 mother's age - as his only companion. As these encounters shift into a clandestine relationship, István's life spirals out of control. Years later, rising through the ranks from the army to the elite circles of London's super-rich, he navigates the twenty-first century's tides of money and power. Torn between love, intimacy, status, and wealth, his newfound riches threaten to undo him completely. 'How do I get out of a reading slump? This is the book to do that' Rhianna Dhillon, BBC Radio 4 'A revelatory novel' Sunday Times 'So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer 'Refreshing, illuminating and true' Financial Times 'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant' Tessa Hadley 'One of the year's best novels to date' Daily Mail 'Utterly engrossing and I read it all in a day' 5* reader review 'I was hooked and tried to read this book with any spare moment that I had' 5* reader review A 'Best Book of 2025' in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail

It is 1948 and Aleksandr, a major in the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic 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.

BenoIt Philippe

Lauréat du Booker Prize 2025 Une expérience de lecture sensuelle et dépouillée, addictive et destabilisante. Lire Magazine István, quinze ans, vient d'emménager avec sa mère dans un quartier modeste d'une petite ville de Hongrie. Isolé, désoeuvré, c'est par hasard qu'il se lie avec sa voisine de palier, une quadragénaire mariée. Celle-ci lui fait découvrir les plaisirs de la chair, jusqu'à ce qu'un incident mette un terme à leur relation. Après quelques années dans un centre de détention pour mineurs, István s'engage dans l'armée et combat en Irak. De retour, il part pour l'Angleterre où, travaillant comme chauffeur et agent de sécurité, il intègre la sphère de l'élite économique et politique, et tente de faire fortune dans l'immobilier. Mais par-delà son ascension sociale se cache un être fondamentalement passif, comme étranger au monde et à lui-même. Même dans son rapport au sexe. À travers la figure d'István, David Szalay décrypte la crise de la masculinité dans un monde dominé par la marchandisation, le culte de la performance et l'augmentation des inégalités. L'implacable anatomie de l'homme contemporain. Un superbe roman. Mordant, intelligent et d'une sagesse troublante... William Boyd Ce qui fait la force de Chair, c'est son style : sobre et nerveux, sans fioritures. Lionel Shirver

David Szalay

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