Description

Booker Prize 2025.

„Flesh“ is a book about what it means to live, what it means to die, what makes it worth filling the time between the two, and what it's like to go through your days with a machine made of flesh.

This hypnotic, disturbingly wise novel tells the Istvan, who turns from an alienated silent youth into an alienated silent man. His life is full of clashes, the dark clouds of disappointment, buried feelings and the silent depths of trauma. The impact of the work comes not so much from what is written, but from what Salai has chosen to gloss over and leave to our imagination. In Istvan he has created, in the most spare, minimalist way possible, a modern anti-hero in the tradition of Camus and Dostoyevsky, a powerful portrait of the myth of free will and alienation, to tell the story of our journey through an ever-changing world and to urge us not to despair and to believe not only in the power of literature, but in each other.

About David Salay say that no one has succeeded in conveying the hyper-solitude of today's Europe more inspiredly.

He was born in 1974 in Montreal, Canada. His mother is Canadian and his father is Hungarian. The family moved to Beirut, but because of the civil war that broke out in Lebanon, he sought refuge in London. Salay graduated from Oxford University and worked for a time in commerce. He has been writing since the age of 10 because, as he says, he is interested in uncovering that great manipulation - fiction - to which the writer subjects his readers. Among his favorite books, he lists „The Hobbit,“ though he considers „The Lord of the Rings“ boring. At age 12, he read all of Frederick Forsyth and was inspired by his books, though he says they are unlikely to hold his attention today. In 2009 he went to Hungary, his father's homeland, ostensibly briefly on family business, but then settled in Pécs for 10 years because it was cheaper and he could make ends meet with the royalties from his books, giving him the freedom to write. Today he lives with his wife and two children in Vienna. He is the author of 6 novels.