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. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that
István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of
control.
As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on
the currents of the twenty-first 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
is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound
questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what
breaks it.
