István is fifteen, new in town, living with his mother in a flat on a Hungarian housing estate, and he doesn’t know how to talk to anybody. The married woman across the hall, closer to his mother’s age than his, takes him on. It ends badly enough to put him in juvenile detention, and from there his life just keeps happening to him — the army, Iraq, dead-end jobs, then London, driving and guarding rich people, then marrying into that money and having it come apart. Szalay writes it stripped to nothing. István barely speaks. Whole years get skipped. You learn he’s grieving because the page goes quiet, and you learn he’s aging because he notices another man’s hair. It won the Booker in 2025, and the judges said they’d never read anything like it.