Flesh

István is fifteen when his mother moves them to a housing estate in provincial Hungary, and fifteen when a woman in the block asks him up to her flat. What happens between them is the first thing in his life, and it ends in violence, a court, and a spell in an institution for young offenders. After that comes the army, Iraq, an injury, and a drift westward into London, where he works the door of a nightclub and then drives a car for a very rich family in Kensington. He is capable, silent and physically imposing, and people keep finding uses for him. In time the wife of the house finds one too, and István moves up through a world of property portfolios and second homes without ever appearing to want any of it. Szalay tells the whole life in flat, clipped scenes and dialogue that keeps returning to the word okay, refusing his protagonist any interiority he has not earned, and the effect is remarkable: a man to whom enormous things happen and who cannot say a word about any of them. It is a novel about class, desire and the body as the only currency some people are issued with, and its restraint makes the final third genuinely difficult to read.