All That Man Is

David Szalay discerns a shared longing in the hearts of nine ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking and despicable, vital, pitiable, hilarious men.

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 Cypriot hotel - to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now. As the weather gets colder, and the men get older, the stakes become bewilderingly high. Dark and disturbing, but also often wickedly and uproariously comic, All That Man Is is notable for the acute psychological penetration Szalay brings to bear on his characters, from the working-class ex-grunt to the pompous college student, the middle-aged loser to the Russian oligarch. Steadily and mercilessly, as this brilliantly conceived book progresses, the protagonist at the centre of each chapter is older than the last one, and All That Man Is gathers exquisite power. 

"...this collection is of the highest standard among younger British authors that I’ve come across ... let me urge you to read him since, on this evidence, he is one of those rare writers with skill in all the disciplines that first-rate fiction requires ... these nine stories about very different men are replete with richly observed humanity, caught on the page as if in the midst of lives that extend backwards and forwards beyond the time we spend with them."   -  Edward Docx, The Guardian

David Szalay has written four novels, including Spring, The Innocent and London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize. His novel All That Man Is won the Gordon Burn prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize.