Literary Fiction

Propulsive and hypnotic, Flesh asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

Flesh by David Szalay was named the winner of the Booker Prize 2025 at a ceremony in London on Monday, 10 November. Szalay receives £50,000 and a trophy, which was presented to him by last year’s winner, Samantha Harvey.

When the long-buried secrets of your ancestors begin to surface, how do you redefine where you truly belong?

Spanning two centuries, the tangled roots of an Irish-Chinese family unfurl backward in time from a climate-altered future to a colonial past. As generational memories unlock, an incredible legacy of survival, identity, and complex inheritance comes to light. This luminous, profoundly tender masterpiece serves as a beautiful invitation to honor the fragile threads that bind us to our history and each other.