István grows up alone with his mother in a small town in Hungary. He is hard to know, uncommunicative and defined, mostly, by what happens to him. He seems to go along with whatever comes his way, and a lot does come his way, some of it in unmanageable doses: sex, prison, the army, some lowly jobs that take him from Hungary to London. It's here that a chance encounter changes his course completely. Leaving his modest beginnings behind, he suddenly finds himself among the super-rich. But just as he is slowly feeling comfortable in this new environment, the precarious edifice starts crumbling beneath him, until finally it comes crashing down altogether. In Flesh, Szalay has conjured a character who is unknowable and blunt, yet fully realized and somehow incredibly loveable. This is a story of a life, about a body in the world, and an epic tale of one man's unpredictable rise and inevitable downfall.
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