All That Man Is
From the Booker Prize winning author of FLESH
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF FLESH
'Increasingly looking like the masterpiece of British fiction from the past few years' Evening Standard
Nine men. Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving – in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel – to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now.
Tracing an arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, All That Man Is brings these separate lives together to show us men as they are – ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking and despicable; vital, pitiable, hilarious, and full of heartfelt longing. And as the years chase them down, the stakes become bewilderingly high in this piercing portrayal of 21st-century manhood.
WINNER OF THE EDGE HILL READER'S CHOICE AWARD
'Some of the best prose to be found in English this year' Guardian
'Exact and true and always subtly intelligent' Tessa Hadley
'It's a rare and wonderous event when a novel changes the way you look at the world around you' William Boyd
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Szalay (London and the South-East) delivers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of nine men at various stages in their lives, each in the throes of extraordinary change. Despite their diverse circumstances, they are all somehow connected, engaged in a search for relevance and dare they even consider it meaning. English teenagers Simon and Ferdinand arrive in Berlin with competing ideas of how best to enjoy their time abroad; B rnard, working halfheartedly in his uncle's window shop outside Lille, France, experiences a life-altering holiday at a Cyprus beach resort; Kristian, a successful Danish tabloid editor, brings down the country's defense minister after an indiscretion; Aleksandr, a disgraced Russian oligarch, contemplates suicide; an aging diplomat considers his mortality while recuperating from a heart operation in an Italian villa and notes, in what could be the book's tagline, "How little we understand about life as it is actually happening. The moments fly past, like trackside pylons seen from a train window." Without exception, the stories subtle, seductive, poignant, humorous bear witness to the alienation, self-doubt, and fragmentation of contemporary life; each succeeds on its own while complementing the others. Szalay's riveting prose and his consummate command of structure illuminate the individual while exploring society's unsettling complexity. In 2013, Szalay was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. This effort exceeds even that lofty expectation.
