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A magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism.
Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving - in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel - to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel, in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the twenty-first-century man.
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 center of each chapter is older than the last one, it gets colder out, and All That Man Is gathers exquisite power. Szalay is a writer of supreme gifts - a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos.
"Starred Review. Without exception, the stories - subtle, seductive, poignant, humorous - bear witness to the alienation, self-doubt, and fragmentation of contemporary life; each succeeds on its own while complementing the others. Szalay's riveting prose and his consummate command of structure illuminate the individual while exploring society's unsettling complexity." - Publishers Weekly
"A grim but compelling composite portrait by a talented writer." - Kirkus
"An astute and entertaining survey of the state of the modern European male... Existential unease made enjoyable, insightful and all too recognisable." - Financial Times (UK), Summer Books 2016
"[David Szalay] is capable of conjuring tenderness from any situation ... [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." - The Guardian (UK)
"Cleverly conceived, authoritative, timely and (in a good way) crushing ... There is a cheerful and ghastly sordidness to everything, and Szalay's prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments, and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste." - London Review of Books (UK)
"Each story grips the reader by the throat. We fully inhabit their progression of heroes and finally face the dreadful truth of the human condition: that nothing is eternal, not us, not our children, the human race, the Earth nor the stars. Rarely has it been so brilliantly and chillingly spelled out." - Daily Mail (UK)
"Profound, sometimes moving and often blackly comic, All That Man Is delights even as it unsettles. It's another bravura performance from Szalay." - The National (UK)
"Szalay ... brings a wide range of skills to bear ... A tour-de-force." - Financial Times (UK)
"Nobody captures the super-sadness of modern Europe as well as Szalay ... The predicaments of the various tormented men come together to produce a rich exploration of male vulnerability ... With All That Man Is, [Szalay] emerges as a writer with a voice unlike any other." - The Spectator (UK)
"Original, piercingly acute and disturbingly, viscerally elegiac." - William Boyd
"Szalay's writing is exact and true and always subtly intelligent; this book is bracing and thrilling and chilling." - Tessa Hadley
This information about All That Man Is was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Szalay is the author of London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; The Innocent; and Spring. In 2013 he was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in Budapest.
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