Szalay Wins Booker Prize With Novel 'Not Like Any Other'

David Szalay won the Booker Prize for fiction on Monday for Flesh, the story of an ordinary man's life over several decades in which what isn't on the page is just as important as what is. Szalay, 51, defeated five other finalists, including favorites Andrew Miller and Kiran Desai, to take the coveted literary award, which brings a $66,000 payday and a big boost to the winner's sales and profile. His was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that included Irish writer Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker, the AP reports. Doyle said that Flesh—a book "about living, and the strangeness of living"—emerged as the judges' unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.

"It's just not like any other book," Doyle said, per the New York Times. Szalay's novel recounts the life of taciturn István, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as a struggling immigrant in Britain to denizen of London high society. The author has said he wanted to write about a Hungarian immigrant and "about life as a physical experience, about what it's like to be a living body in the world." Doyle said István belongs to a group overlooked in fiction: a working-class man. He said that since reading it, he looks more closely when he walks past bouncers standing in the doorways of Dublin pubs. Doyle, whose stories of working-class Dublin life won him the 1993 Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, said, "It presents us with a certain type of man that invites us to look behind the face."

Szalay, who was born in Canada, raised in the UK, and lives in Vienna, was a Booker finalist in 2016 for All That Man Is a series of stories about nine wildly different men. Flesh was praised by many critics but frustrated others with its refusal to fill in the gaps in István's story—great swathes of life, including incarceration and wartime service in Iraq occur off the page—and its stubbornly unexpressive central character, whose most common remark is "Okay." The other finalists were Susan Choi's Flashlight, Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Katie Kitamura's Audition, Ben Markovits' The Rest of Our Lives, and Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter. The Booker Prize was founded in 1969.