Flesh

Szalay's Booker-winning novel tracks István, a taciturn Hungarian man, through juvenile detention, military service, menial labor, and eventual wealth via marriage into London society — but the method is what critics argued about. Major life events are skipped or handled in blank space; grief and shame register through gesture rather than interior monologue, so we learn he's crying because someone tells him to stop, not because the prose describes an emotion. Admirers called this omission the point, a portrait of a man detached from his own feelings rendered formally; detractors called it a hollowed-out draft of a fuller novel, faulting the terse dialogue and missing scenes as withholding rather than deliberate. Both readings are defensible, which is part of what makes it a genuinely unsettled Booker pick.