Flesh

Winner of the Booker Prize 2025

A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.

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. Their encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István barely understands, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the 21st century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

Flesh was announced as the winner of the Booker Prize 2025 on November 10, 2025.