I don’t know where I first heard about this novel. I think it was one of the Lit Hub Recommends emails, which is a fabulous resource.
Here is the blurb …
Nao lives in Tokyo. She is sixteen, and has decided to write a diary before she kills herself, she particularly wants to chronicle the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun. Ruth lives on the Pacific coast of Canada. A few months after the 2010 tsunami she finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore.
This is a beautiful, enchanting novel. Like Ruth, I wanted to keep reading Nao’s story. The structure is fabulous, we switch between Nao’s and Ruth’s perspective. Learning about their lives both inner and outer. Who knew that Japanese school children could be so brutal?
This is my latest book club book. I had it in my digital pile, having bought it thinking I would read all of the Booker prize shortlist for 2025 (I am still going). This won.
Here’s the blurb …
A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp.
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 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.
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.
This has a pared back, direct writing style. It is also like a group of short stories connected together with István being the connection. Each chapter has him in a new place or a new phase of his life, and we don’t know how he got there. In the bits we read he seems very passive, but he joins the army, moves to England, moves back to Hungary so he has some agency. This is a biography told through relationships; the older neighbour, his mother, Helen, Thomas, and his son. He seems attracted to women who have power over him (Helen and the neighbour). Despite not being a sympathetic character, I did feel for him in the end.
