Ripples Book Club, June 2026 — David Szalay: Flesh
Schedule
Tue, 16 Jun, 2026 at 05:30 pm
UTC+02:00Location
Massolit Books & Café in Budapest | Budapest, BU
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Welcome to our newly launched English-language book club!This book club is for you if you’d like to:
• meet like-minded people and have engaging conversations about the books we read
• improve or maintain your English vocabulary, reading comprehension, and speaking skills
Participation is free for now, but registration is required so we can keep the group small and comfortable (maximum 10 people). If you’d like to join, send me an email to [email protected] and I’ll confirm your registration provided that free spots are still available.
David Szalay is the first Hungarian-British writer to win the Booker Prize. Let’s read his sixth novel, Flesh, together!
You can order the book online at Libristo, Bookline, Amazon etc., or borrow it from libraries such as Fővárosi Szabó Ervin Könyvtár.
About the book:
Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.
A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself—estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy. “Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it” (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.
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Where is it happening?
Massolit Books & Café in Budapest, Nagy Diófa utca 30,Budapest, HungaryEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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