How long is it?
368 pages in the Scribner 2025 ebook edition.
Reading facts
✓ Checked- Reading effort
- 27 / 100Light
- Length
- 368 pagesScribner · 2025
- Reading time
- 7 h 15 minat 50 pages an hour ·
- Pace
- Brisk
- Emotional intensity
- 4 / 5
About 7 h 15 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 15 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
At fifteen, István lives with his mother in a Hungarian apartment block, isolated at school and drawn into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor close to his mother's age. The novel follows him across decades, through military service to London, where he works as a bouncer and then a wealthy family's driver. His physical strength earns him a living, while his intimate relationships entangle him with people who hold greater power.
Reader notes
Spare and emotionally detached, the literary novel proceeds through brief scenes and blunt, repetitive conversations, skipping years with little explanation of István's feelings. Sexual abuse is part of his adolescence, described plainly beneath the narration's restraint.
How it reads
- Writing style
- Direct · Minimalist · Spare
- Tone
- Bleak · Detached · Melancholic
- Structure
- Linear
- Driven by
- Character · Relationships
- Point of view
- Third person, limited
- Setting
- Hungary and London
Reading complexity
- Writing
- 2 / 5
- Ideas
- 3 / 5
- Structure
- 2 / 5
- Background knowledge
- 1 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
- Writing
- How much attention the sentences and language require.
- Ideas
- How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
- Structure
- How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
- Background knowledge
- Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
- Emotional intensity
- Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
- Class
- Identity
- Marriage
- Morality
- Wealth
Content notes
- Violence
- Mild
- Sexual content
- Strong
- Swearing
- Strong
- Substance use
- Mild
- Abuse
- Strong
- Self-harm or suicide
- Mild
Standing and awards
Highly regarded
- Booker Prize, 2025
- Kirkus Prize finalist, 2025
- Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction longlist, 2026
Questions readers ask
Which edition is shown here?
Scribner · 2025 · eBook. ISBN 9781982122812.
How long does it take to read Flesh?
About 7 hours 15 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 368-page Scribner edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
David Szalay
David Szalay is a novelist whose fiction tracks lives shaped by movement, money, bodily need, and uneven distributions of power. Contemporary Europe is his recurring terrain, with borders and class boundaries placing pressure on desire, masculinity, and belonging. He often builds narratives from discrete, mutually illuminating sections, leaving consequential episodes unstated so that character emerges through action, transition, and silence. All That Man Is links nine men at different ages and across Europe into a composite rather than a continuous plot. Flesh narrows that method to one inarticulate man over several decades, using terse prose and large chronological gaps to make readers infer the emotional history between scenes. Bleak circumstances are threaded with comedy rooted in vanity and self-absorption, without placing the author above his characters.
If you liked this
Edition and details
- Publisher
- Scribner
- Publication year
- 2025
- Format
- eBook
- Pages
- 368
- ISBN
- 9781982122812
- Edition language
- English
- Original language
- English
- First published
- 2025
- Genres and form
- Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Literary fiction · Contemporary literary · Psychological fiction
- Editions
- 1
- Languages
- 1 (English)
The catalog does not yet include a matching edition. Details may differ between editions.