All That Man Is
From the Booker Prize winning author of FLESH
Published on 7. April 2016
448 pages
978-1-4481-9237-3 (ISBN)
Description
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
'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
Reviews / Votes
All That Man Is... looks increasingly like the masterpiece of British fiction from the past few years. -- David Sexton * Evening Standard * David Szalay pushed at the fault lines between the novel and short story form in All That Man Is linked tales of European masculinity in crisis, whose effect is monumentally bleak, but which contain some of the best prose to be found in English this year. -- Justine Jordan * Guardian Books of the Year * Szalay's writing is exact and true and always subtly intelligent; this book is bracing and thrilling and chilling. -- Tessa Hadley It's a rare and wonderous event when a novel changes the way you look at the world around you; and this was the case with [All That Man Is]... A worthy winner of the Gordon Burn Prize this year. Gordon Burn would have loved it. Say no more. -- William Boyd * New Statesman, Book of the Year * There is everything to relish about this intelligent, moving, thoroughly European search for the meaning of life ... It's hard to imagine reading a better book this year. -- Melissa Katsoulis * Times * This feels like a great novel driven by its overarching theme: what is my life, here and now, all about? ... Rarely has it been so brilliantly and chillingly spelled out. -- John Harding * Daily Mail * Trains a high-powered microscope on modern life... Szalay might have found in All that Man Is the perfect vehicle for his particular talent... It brings a sensory richness to the bleak and the drab... A showcase for Szalays virtuosic range... Each character is in crisis...yet Szalay grants each a lyrical moment of sensory immersion in the world. It is the resonance of these moments of fleeting transcendence that form the structure of this strange and lucid novel. -- Duncan White * Daily Telegraph * Here is a newish, youngish...contemporary British novelist worth catching up on and following... Luxuriant and Hobbesian... Szalay is an offended satirist with a remarkable verbal imagination... Szalay's prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments...irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste. * London Review of Books * All That Man Is is a triumph... By the fourth chapter the book as a whole has become gripping... Szalay has harnessed the natural energy of time, and the result is a 100-megawatt novel: intelligent, intricate, so very well made. The form perfectly fitting the content. When I reached the end, I turned straight back to the start to begin again. * Sunday Times * [Szalay is] capable of conjuring tenderness from any situation... Szalay keeps the writing so judgment-free and is so honest about the unpredictability of desire... [Readers] will find a great deal to enjoy in these pages, and further evidence that Szalay...is one of the best fortysomething writers we have. * Observer *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
File size
2,57 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-4481-9237-3 (9781448192373)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
David Szalay is the author of five previous works of fiction: Spring, The Innocent, London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes, All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Turbulence, which won the Edge Hill Prize. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Vienna. His work has been translated into over twenty languages.
