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Reading lists

Short books to read when you’re overwhelmed

A reading guide for David Szalay's Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel All That Man Is, a piercing portrayal of 21st century manhood

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All That Man Is by David Szalay

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David Szalay

Turbulence

An original BBC Radio 4 commission, Turbulence is the new short story sequence from the Man Booker prize-shortlisted author of All That Man Is.

More tales of mortality from a master of the genre... [Turbulence] is a chilling achievement.

A portrait of our species at a time of crisis... Szalay is our greatest chronicler of these rootless, tradeworn places, and the desperate, itinerant lives of those who inhabit them.

Ingenious… [David Szalay] knows about people… Stark and spare, Turbulence is an impressive novel.

Reading David Szalay is like receiving a series of electric shocks: his preference for short, sharp sketches, rather than a single, linear plot, means that his books deny the reader the comforts of conventional, more languid storytelling… Szalay’s stories may be over in just a matter of minutes, but they are violently, appallingly immersive.

As Szalay consistently uproots his reader, proliferating characters and locations, [Turbulence] could be seen as an experiment in the limits of sympathy… a practical test for the way we feel (or fail to feel) for others. Such calculated neutrality is the perfect foil to some heart-stoppingly beautiful prose… Things in this elegant, frightening, politically charged book, fall apart. They also lift off.

Szalay’s gift for inhabiting entirely different lives is as remarkable and spooky as ever.

[David Szalay's] mastery of form is evident: with deft touches he builds a tangible world.

I was intrigued by the premise and the first story didn't disappoint, capturing that altered state which being cooped up in [an aeroplane] seems to invoke.

Beautifully and delicately told. Each perfectly-formed story is part of a bigger narrative, as Szalay explores the way our actions influence those around us, and highlights the fact that while our technologically connected planet seems to be growing smaller, the people living upon it have grown more isolated from one another.

Especially striking, in Mr Szalay’s recent work [Turbulence], is how easily he inhabits diverse perspectives… A willingness to leave the dots unjoined is one of the virtues that make Mr Szalay's fiction so rewarding.

One of the impressive things about [Turbulence] is the speed and deftness with which Szalay convinces the reader that he knows what it's like to be an Indian guest worker in Qatar, an upmarket journalist in Sao Paulo, or a prosperous Senegalese businessman... Szalay's mixture of directness and withholding looks increasingly masterly.

Affecting… an ambitious, realist and fascinating sequenced collection that often courts discomfort.

The wonderful David Szalay is back with Turbulence, an Editor's Choice for me.

Szalay conjures up his characters and locations deftly and elegantly, giving each subtle vignette a lingering resonance.

Embedded in each story is a similar moment of jeopardy, disrupting the illusion to remind us how “normal life” is as unlikely and precarious as flight… Each chapter is extremely short, and yet, with impressive economy, Szalay establishes both a new character and sense of security, only to shatter it with a swift, surprising reveal.

There’s barely a story here which isn’t in some way engaging and absorbing, the author’s compassion and involvement with characters shining through even in times of deepest isolation.

Each story is wonderfully imagined, with a pleasing absence of authorial sermonising. Ambitious and haunting, these expertly executed vignette – confident in their concision and control – seem hard to improve upon.

What Szalay does so well is the minute-by-minute apprehension of the close-up world…combined…with an impressively global vision… It’s part of Szalay’s genius that he can encompass the distance between the two.

High-concept and highbrow… a surprisingly poignant lap around the world

Turbulence…works brilliantly, with each tale carrying on from the last, interconnected by characters on a journey somewhere. The transitory nature of modern life is captured magnificently, building into a fine meditation on 21st-century anxiety.

Turbulence… comes together as a whole wonderfully, showing great insight and empathy, as well as a subtle yet gifted writing style. A beautiful little book!

David Szalay is the author of five previous works of fiction: Spring, The Innocent, London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. His work has been translated into over twenty languages.

**WINNER OF THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019** 
 
Discover the brilliant new short story collection from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of All That Man Is 
 
Twelve people on the move around planet Earth, twelve individual lives, each in turmoil, and each in some way touching the next. 
 
In this nuanced and deeply moving sequence, David Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the world in twelve plane journeys, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers and parents, children and siblings, or nobody at all. 
 
Along the way, Szalay deftly depicts the ripple effect that, knowingly or otherwise, a person’s actions have on those around them, and invites us to consider our own place in the vast and delicately balanced network of human relationships that is the world we live in today.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016

All That Man Is

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE 
 
Men as they really are... An ingenious book from the exceptional Granta Best Young British Novelist

All That Man Is... looks increasingly like the masterpiece of British fiction from the past few years.

David Szalay pushed at the fault lines between the novel and short story form in All That Man Is linked tales of European masculinity in crisis, whose effect is monumentally bleak, but which contain some of the best prose to be found in English this year.

Szalay's writing is exact and true and always subtly intelligent; this book is bracing and thrilling and chilling.

It’s a rare and wonderous event when a novel changes the way you look at the world around you; and this was the case with [All That Man Is]… A worthy winner of the Gordon Burn Prize this year. Gordon Burn would have loved it. Say no more.

There is everything to relish about this intelligent, moving, thoroughly European search for the meaning of life ... It's hard to imagine reading a better book this year.

This feels like a great novel driven by its overarching theme: what is my life, here and now, all about? ... Rarely has it been so brilliantly and chillingly spelled out.

Trains a high-powered microscope on modern life… Szalay might have found in All that Man Is the perfect vehicle for his particular talent… It brings a sensory richness to the bleak and the drab… A showcase for Szalays virtuosic range… Each character is in crisis...yet Szalay grants each a lyrical moment of sensory immersion in the world. It is the resonance of these moments of fleeting transcendence that form the structure of this strange and lucid novel.

Here is a newish, youngish…contemporary British novelist worth catching up on and following… Luxuriant and Hobbesian… Szalay is an offended satirist with a remarkable verbal imagination… Szalay’s prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments…irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste.

All That Man Is is a triumph… By the fourth chapter the book as a whole has become gripping… Szalay has harnessed the natural energy of time, and the result is a 100-megawatt novel: intelligent, intricate, so very well made. The form perfectly fitting the content. When I reached the end, I turned straight back to the start to begin again.

[Szalay is] capable of conjuring tenderness from any situation… Szalay keeps the writing so judgment-free and is so honest about the unpredictability of desire… [Readers] will find a great deal to enjoy in these pages, and further evidence that Szalay…is one of the best fortysomething writers we have.

Szalay exposes the vulnerability that belies young men’s sexual bravado… Szalay takes us inside distinctive worlds.

Szalay’s writing is always sensitive, often funny and brilliantly observed… This is a very poignant piece of writing… All That Man Is does have the feel of a novel: in its evenness of tone, its thematic coherence, its driving sense of purpose… This is a quietly dazzling book by a writer who thoroughly deserves his growing reputation.

He is one of those rare writers with skill in all the disciplines that first-rate fiction requires. The most immediate pleasure is his literary intelligence… Szalay’s writing is virtuosic… These are the best short stories I’ve read for ages.

He exposes with clear-sighted precision the multiple and (largely) disastrous failings of his characters… Szalay is too sharp by far to overstate the inevitable impact of his fellow man's actions… He exposes the problem in such style and with such rigour.

He writes clean, unshowy sentences that move easily between the diction of casual speech and a more distanced tone. And he’s able to hold a reader even when there isn’t much going on, relying on assured storytelling rather than busy plotting. All this means that the new book goes down smoothly. It’s also a bit of a tour de force when it comes to social and geographical reach… It’s part of Szalay’s appeal that he’s more interested in getting at the texture of experience than he is in stuffing it into elegant packaging.

He goes to town on nine specimens of the male gender, only surfacing to spit out the bones… The predicaments of the various tormented men come together to produce a rich exploration of male vulnerability… With All That Man Is, Szalay] he emerges as a writer with a voice unlike any other.

Szalay’s audacious new novel… A superb meditation on ageing.

The book is compelling, both for its fine-grained rendering of what one character calls “the texture of existence” and for its intricate patterning of events… His writing pulls you completely into their world. This is a book that I was impatient to return to and regretted finishing

He’s a fine writer, good at charting the bleaker, less edifying reaches of male desire.

Profound, sometimes moving and often blackly comic, All That Man Is delights even as it unsettles, it’s another bravura performance from Szalay.

My favourite novel of the year was David Szalay’s compulsive and timely All That Man Is.

Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year

His characters are so believable and his writing is so insightful. Szalay is a charming stylist and it is impossible not to take pleasure in his short, sharp, propulsive sentences; even when the author describes drabness or depravity, his prose is bright and clear.

Szalay’s eye is keen, forensic to the finest and most credible detail, but he rarely succumbs to the excesses of digression… Each of the stories is a compelling micro-plot… A Bildungsroman of intense intelligence and sensitivity, which can handle both big political ideas and the intensely introspective existential crises of very average men.

[A] boldly sad-funny and clear-eyed new novel.

Szalay’s handling of this material is sensitive, generous and often accomplished. He is adept at evoking the metaphysical stirrings that accompany shifts in light, time, weather… He is capable of sharp, fresh and affecting perceptions… [All That Man Is] offers enriching moments of immersion in the texture of existence.

A wonderfully pan-European collection of stories… All are bleakly funny and brilliantly drawn.

An impressive investigation of masculinity and – with excellent timing – Europe.

Szalay is on the cusp of widespread recognition and acclaim, but it could take the Booker to really tip him in. Szalay’s win would also be a symbolic victory for that generation of writers that seemed to usher in the new millennium by their will and words alone. To put it bluntly, this is the sort of coup that could change the guard of the British literary establishment.

A composite portrait of modern masculinity and the foibles of contemporary Europe.

This book is well written, the language is clear and evocative of mood and movement, the observations offered are both simple and profound, the overall effect is a sophisticated commentary on life.

If you haven’t read David Szalay before, these finely crafted, bite size narratives seem like a good place to start.

[It is] scabrous, intelligent and hugely engaging.

Szalay got some of the critical recognition his formidable talent deserves for All That Man Is

A revelation… Not only of a brilliantly inventive and observant writer…but of new possibilities for the novel as a form… I can’t stop thinking about it.

Szalay brilliantly avoids approximation by precisely detailing the inner and outer worlds of his nine very different characters.. [It is] really worth your time – both first and second time through.

[There are] Brilliant stories in All That Man Is.

A stylish exploration of masculinity that deserved its place on the Booker shortlist.

I’m still struck by just how natural Szalay’s vernacular English voices sound in the mouths of his listless French teenagers, Hungarian bodyguards and cynical Danish journalists.

Szalay’s astute and insightful book focuses on nine different men, each at a tricky stage of life… This is a deft, amusing and often disturbing vision of the plight of the modern European male.

A collection of funny, moving, sometimes desperately sad stories

Deservedly shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize… A compelling masterpiece.

A witty deconstruction of modern masculinity.

All That Man Ishas a rather surprising tenderness. A grand project neatly realised.

Szalay paints a bleak yet fascinating picture of European man today.

Shortlisted for last year’s Booker, these nine stories about very different men are replete with richly observed humanity, caught on the page as if in the midst of lives that extend backwards and forwards beyond the time we spend with them. Szalay’s writing is virtuosic, whether external realities or psychology… These are the best shirt stories I’ve read for ages.

It is beautifully written, with characters both repulsive and charming in equal measure

To write with such range and aliveness to a character, and to do that nine times, each time as vivid as the last, is genius

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE 
 
WINNER OF THE EDGE HILL READER'S CHOICE AWARD 
 
Nine men. Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving – in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel – to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now. 
 
Tracing an arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, All That Man Is brings these separate lives together to show us men as they are – ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking and despicable; vital, pitiable, hilarious, and full of heartfelt longing. And as the years chase them down, the stakes become bewilderingly high in this piercing portrayal of 21st-century manhood.

Spring

A brilliant novel about money and love, on betting everything on a single throw, by an award-winning young writers, chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

Spring confirms that [Szalay] is a writer with the whole range of talents... Often outstanding

A brave and intelligent novel... This is one of those books that leaves you not only with admiration for the novelist, but also with a sense of wonder about the precision of the novel form itself

A texture of truthfulness quite unlike that of any other fiction about London that I know...a very beautifully poised novel

The forensic scrutiny of every aspect of a fledgling relationship, from both points of view, is one of the many delights of Spring... Devastatingly powerful...also extremely funny, in that understated, unexpected way that makes you burst into sudden noise in public places and alarm those around you. Szalay's dialogue is pithy and sharp; his peripheral characters lip-smackingly delicious

The lives of two disconsolately unfulfilled people start to blaze, thanks to Szalay's often brutal honesty...formidable ear for dialogue - which transforms the most mundane exchanges into comedy, a la Mike Leigh - and seductively sensuous descriptions

A brave venture...psychologically realistic

A sharp, truthful, funny portrait of contemporary manners that is also unexpectedly moving

Highly unusual in its realism and astuteness about the way we live now...in its understated way, a very beautifully poised novel

Szalay is certainly a writer to look out for... The writer [he] most puts me in mind of is a young Julian Barnes

Szalay is immensely talented... [he] gets everything right: the atmosphere, the suspense, the inner lives of his characters. Absolutely superb

James and Katherine meet at a wedding in London in 2006, towards the end of the money-for-nothing years. James is a man with a varied past now living alone in a flat in Bloomsbury; Katherine is separated from her husband and working in an interim job in a luxury hotel. They exchange phone numbers at the wedding, but from then on not much goes according to the script...

The Innocent

A searing and gripping thriller set in Communist Russia from prize-winning novelist David Szalay.

A psychologically intricate, flawlessly researched tale of Stalin's legacy through the eyes of a disillusioned old communist. It felt as English as Le Carre with its elegant Cold War scene-setting and quiet but intense emotional range.

This is a double headed story that is both sad and compelling

Szalay weaves a multilayered narrative ripe with period detail... A challenging thriller... Gripping

Impressive... Still in his mid-thirties, Szalay will surely soon be adding more prizes to his Betty Trask

Szalay moves skilfully across time and shows that history's end is not prophesied in books, but written in the wind

David Szalay... has created an extraordinary character, a KGB man you can imagine knowing or even being

This is an exciting and memorable read. Expertly researched, it feels authentic, but wears its learning reassuringly lightly. Anyone who appreciated Martin Amis's Koba the Dread and Orlando Figes's The Whisperers will love it

It is 1948 and Aleksandr, a major in the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic to investigate one of the patients there. The patient is a man long presumed dead - a now severely incapacitated veteran of the Second World War, who seems unable to remember any of his past. Twenty-four years later, Aleksandr is haunted by the case. With his Stalinist faith under threat as the Cold War recedes, he interrogates his memories and the effect the case had on himself and on those he loved most.

London and the South-East

A stunning debut novel set in the murky worlds of telephone salesmen and supermarket shelf-stackers by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

One of the great English novels of recent years, a work of sublime literary realism, and a blackly comic meditation on the sins and sorrows of modernity

A terrific debut, written in a present tense which flashes every so often into the past - a trick which Szalay pulls off with confidence... a tense and compelling read

A funny, painful, graphic demonstration that our job is a crucial part of our identity.... It's compulsively readable

Szalay's satire is sharp, though his depictions of rush-hour raise the blood pressure to levels that are not advisable

This is David Szalay's first novel, and it's very, very good...it has a whiff of The Office...Superb

Paul Rainey, an ad salesman, perceives dimly through a fog of psychoactive substances his dissatisfaction with his life- professional, sexual, weekends, the lot. He only wishes there was something he could do about it. And 'something' seems to fall into his lap when a meeting with an old friend and fellow salesman, Eddy Jaw, leads to the offer of a new job. But when this offer turns out to be as misleading as Paul's sales patter, his life and that of his family are transformed in ways very much more peculiar than he ever thought possible.

Flesh is at once intricate and spacious, it flows both fast and deep. There's brilliance on every page. Szalay is an ingenious conductor of time, and of the fates and forces that give shape to a life

Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money

A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise

This is a marvellous novel. Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer

‘Refreshing, illuminating and true… a moving work of art with a plot that compels and surprises and devastates’

[A] compulsive look at wealth and power, love and sex… Szalay has that rare ability to convey entire galaxies in the sparest writing

Flesh…has ensnared me… It’s rare to find prose this spare that doesn’t feel affect, but Szalay handles surface and depth with skill, as only great novelists can. Flesh is a revelatory novel

In István David Szalay has created a modern existential antihero in the grand tradition of Camus and Dostoevsky. Amid the random accidents and desultory decisions that shape his life, and come to feel like fate, he is at once a cool observer and a towering presence. Taut, spare and perfectly structured, Flesh reads like a gripping thriller which slowly gathers to itself the emotional power of classical tragedy

A propulsive novel from the Booker-shortlisted writer about the forces that make — and break — a life

Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one… [There’s] so much searing insight into the way we live now. It’s a masterpiece

With exquisite control and precision and insight, David Szalay renders lost men that you cannot forget

Szalay’s prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments, and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste

The moving and propulsive whole-life story is perfect for fans of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart

Independent, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

Flesh is a magnificent novel by a formidably gifted writer. Tense, addictive, devastating, wise, it confirms Szalay’s singular brilliance

Flesh is never less than completely gripping. Each subsequent chapter alights on another stage in István’s life, like a stone skimming over water… [but] also works, quite brilliantly, as a perfectly contained short story, able to stand alone as well as driving the novel to its tragic denouement

[With] pacey, provocatively terse prose… Szalay handles the story with patience and resourcefulness. Writing about the kind of figure who is usually given short shrift in literary fiction, he avoids the obvious showdowns, allowing illness and accident to deepen the characters’ attachments in unexpected ways

Szalay has succeeded in writing a kind of anti-Bildungsroman

Szalay delivers a helter-skelter yarn in enviably crisp prose

A gripping study of the choice that can make or break a life… Until the last page, it’s hard to know how to feel about him [Istvan]… Szalay draws characters superbly, drives the plot deftly and mercilessly

Flesh…has more than just a biblical allusion in common with [Samuel] Butler’s masterpiece [The Way of All Flesh]. Thrillingly…it also shares its bold ontological and artistic ambitions… Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive

With exacting prose and astonishing incisiveness, Flesh portrays money’s parameters from the perspective of someone encountering it for the first time

The author’s elegant, stripped-back prose powers a narrative rich in insight and pathos

Brilliant from the first lines to the last

A superb, surprisingly propulsive novel, one of the best of the year so far… [Flesh] captures something of the alienated despairing fatalism at the heart of modern life

A propulsive investigation into sex, power, class and masculinity

Szalay… has adopted a leaner, sparer style of writing for his latest beguiling novel, which tracks one man’s life over 50 years… It’s tense, unnerving and charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our lives

'A revelatory novel' Sunday Times 
 
'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital 
 
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. 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 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. 
 
Chosen as a ‘Best Book of 2025’ by the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail 
 
‘Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls, author of One Day 
 
'It’s been a long time since I’ve been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one ... So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer 
 
'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer' Tessa Hadley

David Szalay

Praise for Flesh

Flesh is at once intricate and spacious, it flows both fast and deep. There's brilliance on every page. Szalay is an ingenious conductor of time, and of the fates and forces that give shape to a lif ...

Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money

A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise

Flesh is at once intricate and spacious, it flows both fast and deep. There's brilliance on every page. Szalay is an ingenious conductor of time, and of the fates and forces that give shape to a lif ...

Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money

A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise

Flesh is at once intricate and spacious, it flows both fast and deep. There's brilliance on every page. Szalay is an ingenious conductor of time, and of the fates and forces that give shape to a lif ...

Flesh is a wonderful novel – so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money

A superb novel, written with great terse authority and allure: mordant, knowing and disturbingly wise

Books by David Szalay

Articles featuring David Szalay

Short books to read when you’re overwhelmed

All That Man Is by David Szalay

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