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David Szalay thoroughly deserves the Booker Prize. Flesh is a remarkably compelling novel, giving us a whole life story in pared down, almost clinical prose. The sentences are short and simple in both grammar and vocabulary. Many paragraphs consist of a single sentence. The dialogue is rudimentary, often monosyllabic.

We meet István as a 15-year-old, living with his mother in a dull Hungarian town, just beginning to discover sex. He is seduced by a 42-year-old neighbour, an affair ending in disaster when a tussle with the woman’s ailing husband results in the man’s death.

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