An Evening with David Szalay at Waterstones ManchesterDeansgate

We are delighted to welcome acclaimed author David Szalay to Deansgate, celebrating the paperback release of his Booker-winning novel: Flesh.

At once panoramic and intimate, this masterful novel from the author of All That Man Is traces the path of a life brought low by outside events and ranges from post-communist Hungary to the London of the super-rich.

David Szalay joins us to discuss this brilliant novel and answer audience questions, followed by a signing. Doors at 6pm.

About Flesh

Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Propulsive and hypnotic, spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

About the author

DAVID SZALAY is the author of six works of fiction, including London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.