All posts must be directly book related, informative, and discussion focused. If you're looking for help with a personal book recommendation, consult our Suggested Reading page or ask in: /r/suggestmeabook Quick Rules:ĭo not post shallow content. It is our intent and purpose to foster and encourage in-depth discussion about all things related to books, authors, genres or publishing in a safe, supportive environment. Subreddit Rules - Message the mods - Related Subs AMA Info The FAQ The Wiki Join in the Weekly 'What Are You Reading?' Thread!.Check out the Weekly Recommendation Thread.New Release: Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone.

Szalay is a writer of supreme gifts-a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos. 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. 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.ĭark 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.

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.

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. Winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for FictionĪ magnificent and ambitiously conceived portrait of contemporary life, by a genius of realism

All That Man Is by David Szalay