All That Man Is (Shortlisted For The Man Booker Prize 2016)

Description: SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE. 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.

Review: "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

Prizes: Winner of Gordon Burn Prize 2016. Shortlisted for Gordon Burn Prize 2016 and Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2016.

Author Biography: David Szalay is the author of three previous novels: Spring, The Innocent and London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. Raised in London, he has lived in Canada and Belgium, and is now based in Budapest. In 2013 he was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.