Flesh

David Szalay’s Flesh follows two people — a man and a woman, never quite named — through a relationship that is passionate, confused, and ultimately impossible to resolve into any of the usual categories of love, lust, or companionship. Set between London and Eastern Europe, it traces the push and pull of desire with a prose style of uncommon precision: each sentence does exactly what it intends, and nothing more, leaving a great deal unsaid that is nonetheless entirely present.

Szalay emerged with All That Man Is — which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — as one of the most significant British fiction writers of his generation. Flesh, his earlier novel, shows the same gifts in a more concentrated form: the ability to render inner life through external observation, to make the reader feel the full weight of what two people are to each other without ever quite explaining it.

For readers who value fiction that trusts them to bring their own intelligence — and that rewards that trust with something that lasts. Published by Jonathan Cape.