All That Man Is

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National Geographic Books, May 10, 2016 - Fiction - 448 pages
Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize

A brilliantly observed, large-hearted work of fiction that introduces to a North American audience a major and mature literary talent. For readers of David Bezmozgis, Nathan Englander, Neil Smith, John Cheever, and Milan Kundera. 
 
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 twenty-first-century manhood.

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About the author (2016)

DAVID SZALAY was born in Montreal in 1974, moved to the UK the following year and has lived there for many years until recently moving to a small town in Hungary. He went to Oxford University and has written a number of radio dramas for the BBC, as well as three previous novels. He won the Betty Trask Prize for his first novel London and the South-East, along with the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was recently named one of The Telegraph's Top 20 British Writers under 40 and has also made it onto Granta magazine's 2013 list of the Best of Young British Novelists. The author lives in Hungary.

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