Budapest

Few first novels, let alone literary debuts in translation from German, arrive with quite so many plaudits – or better covers for those who like horses – as the 23-year-old Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár, which sold more than 200,000 copies on its release in Germany and Switzerland last year. ‘A truly great writer steps onto the stage,’ trumpets Daniel Kehlmann, who is no stranger to great writing: his latest novel, The Director, is on the International Booker Prize longlist. To Patti Smith, Biedermann is ‘gifted’. He is also a scion of the eponymous Lázárs, an aristocratic Hungarian family, making this first foray into fiction a personal project.

London and the South East, The Innocent, Spring, All That Man Is, Turbulence – the titles of David Szalay’s first five novels, which won a flurry of prizes, are all captured, in a sense, by Flesh, his sixth. Much of the latest book is set in Britain’s capital, and the innocent frequently lose that tag as its protagonist battles to advance his position. When we first meet him, Istvan is 15, living with his mother in Budapest in the dying days of communism and being introduced to sex by a neighbour. Having served a jail sentence for killing the woman’s husband, this ‘solitary individual’ joins the army and, after tours in the Middle East, heads for London – only to be stuck on the door of a strip club.