Dear Great Book Guru, One of my New Year’s Eve resolutions for 2026 is to read more prize-winning books – perhaps one a week. Can you start me off? Determined Book Lover........... Dear Determined Book Lover, The 2025 Booker Prize winner is a great place to start: FLESH by David Szalay. We meet our hero Istvan as a fifteen year old living with his mother in a shabby Hungarian apartment complex. Their lives are difficult emotionally and financially, and Istvan is eager to move on. When he is hired by another tenant- an older woman- to run errands, things become easier but a chance encounter with her husband results in the husband’s death- was it an accident or was it…murder? Throughout, the novel poses these quandaries – does our hero know more, do more, feel more than his monologue suggests. Istvan response to every question, every situation is “OK” (one reviewer counted 340 OK’s in a 351-page book ). There is a strong Dickensian feel as Istvan faces obstacle after obstacle –juvenile prison, a stint in Iraq , a perhaps heroic moment on the battlefield, rescue by a wealthy patron…. A large part of the book chronicles his fortuitous encounters with influential men and women who see in him qualities he doesn’t recognize in himself and use him to their advantage. As he meets up with these vividly drawn characters, you want to cry out- “no, no- don’t believe them” but our hero goes forward blithely unaware. In the end, we see Everyman in Istvan – stumbling through an OK life. Highly recommended