David Szalay's ‘Flesh’ has won the 2025 Booker Prize.

Here is an excerpt: 

There’s some sort of holdup. Every day they expect to fly out and every day they are told it will be “another twenty-four hours.”They’re staying in a hotel with a swimming pool. They spend most of the day next to the pool.

It’s not really hot enough for swimming. It’s not quite pool weather. It’s like seventy-five or something. Still, they spend most of the day at the poolside—there isn’t anything else to do.

The plastic sun loungers next to the pool face those towers—those three towers that look like spikes pointing at the sky, with a few blue spheres impaled on two of them.

He opens his eyes and sees them there, in the middle distance, pointing at the empty sky.

Usually in the afternoon a sort of light sleep comes. Sounds in a spaceless world take on an abstract quality. Sparrows.

A passing helicopter.

Voices at different distances. Something else, he isn’t sure what. Sparrows.

He opens his eyes and finds things different. The shadows in different places. The quality of the light not quite the same, softer, more opalescent, and part of the pool in the shade, making the water there look flat and deep.

You want to have your last swim while the sun still has enough strength to warm you up again afterward. So at around four he stands up and approaches the edge of the pool.

For a while he lingers there, with a sad feeling.

Then he dives in, and the water sloshes and swallows in the drains at the side.

*

They have these vouchers they can use in the hotel restaurant, which is always a buffet. They eat all their meals there. There’s a weird selection of things.

What there isn’t is alcohol.

There isn’t any alcohol anywhere.

Once or twice they go out into the city. There isn’t anything to do there so they soon return to the hotel.

In the evening there’s the sound of the mosques or whatever.

They start up all over the place, not at exactly the same time but sort of overlapping, so that the overall effect is slightly chaotic.

There’s something about it that he likes, though.

The air seems to vibrate.

When they stop it’s not all at exactly the same time either. They drop out one by one until there’s only one left, and then that one stops too, and it’s almost dark, and you can hear the sound of the swifts, the shrieks as they zoom around with what seems like incautious speed in the lingering twilight. Quite often he’s sitting outside at that point, smoking a cigarette, with the swifts shrieking in the air around him. They skim the surface of the pool, he notices, taking a drink. It must taste horrible—the water is strongly chlorinated.

He stubs out his cigarette in one of the sand-filled ashtrays and takes the elevator up to the fifth floor.

He and Norbi are sharing a room.

Most of the prostitutes in Kuwait are from Southeast Asia.

*

At supper on Thursday word goes around that they’ll be flying out tonight. They pack their stuff and wait in the lobby, still half-expecting to be told that it was a false alarm. That has already happened twice.

Buses arrive, though.

There’s a murmur of excitement when they see them through the front of the hotel. These two white buses with nothing on them to identify whose they are.

For quite a long time after that nothing happens. The buses just wait there, with their Pakistani drivers smoking next to them.

Then finally the major arrives and they board the buses, which set off through the mild, quiet streets of the city.

Facing them from the front, holding on to two seats to maintain his balance, the major says that they’re on their way to Ali Al Salem.

They won’t be flying home, though.

He tells them that they’ll be flying to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

“From there there’ll be transport to Tata. I’m sorry, lads,” he says over their disappointed voices. “At least we’re going home tonight.”

There’s some problem with the plane, though. It doesn’t leave until the next morning.

They spend the night lying on the floor at Ali Al Salem, using their packs as pillows.

There’s a table with sandwiches wrapped in plastic, baskets of Mars and Snickers bars, glass bottles of soft drinks, and tokens for the coffee machine.

There’s also a cigarette machine.

Using his last Kuwaiti coins, with their Arabic writing and pictures of sailboats, he buys a few packs to take home.

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