newsletter issue 221

The Booker Prize for 2025 has been awarded to the Hungarian-British author David Szalay for Flesh, a coming-a-full-circle story about Istvan, a Hungarian boy who goes from living in a housing complex with his mother in Hungary to a correctional home to the army to the British upper class and then back home to Hungary again. Flesh, for all the hunger for life that its protagonist exhibits, is an exercise in restraint with language, the strategic pulling back achieving more than what verbose pondering can. (Let’s all now reply to emails with “OK”.) Announcing the prize on Monday, the judges said they had “not read anything quite like it”. Alas, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, widely tipped as a favourite to win this year, didn’t win. A book that doesn’t let your attention waver once through its 800 pages deserves kudos, though.

There’s a lot happening in OTT, too, this week. There’s Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a cinematic wonder of prosthetics, costume, and the most dramatic archival Tiffany pieces; Apple TV’s Pluribus from the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul; and even Ryan Murphy’s bizarre legal drama (with nary a courtroom in sight) All’s Fair, if hate-watching is your thing. A more under-the-radar but wonderful show, Quinta Brunson’s Abbott Elementary, dropped its third season recently and deserves some attention. (Think The Office but set in an under-funded public school in Philadelphia.)