David Szalay

Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize | Finalist for the Kirkus Prize | Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence From Booker Prize finalist and “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have” (Esquire), a “captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic” (The Baffler) novel about a...

Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the planet in twelve flights, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers or estranged siblings, aging parents, baby grandchildren, or nobody at all....

Twelve people on the move around planet Earth, 12 individual lives, each in turmoil, and each in some way touching the next. In this nuanced and deeply moving sequence, David Szalay's diverse protagonists circumnavigate the world in 12 plane journeys....

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.