To celebrate its place on the shortlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize we have an interview with David Szalay about his novel All That Man Is. Is the modern male in crisis and what does this fractured tale across Europe have to tell us about them? Alex Clark interviews a man with an unsparing glance into the inside of men’s heads.

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David Szalay – All That Man Is

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Winner of the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize

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 Isbrings 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 21st-century manhood.

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