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All That Man Is

By: David Szalay
Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Mark Meadows, Huw Parmenter
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Publisher's summary

Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving - in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel - to understand what it means to be alive here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe. And so these nine lives form an ingenious and new kind of novel in which David Szalay expertly plots a dark predicament for the 21st-century man.

Dark and disturbing, but also often wickedly and uproariously comic, All That Man Is is notable for the acute psychological penetration Szalay brings to bear on his characters, from the working-class ex-grunt to the pompous college student, the middle-aged loser to the Russian oligarch. Szalay is a writer of supreme gifts - a master of a new kind of realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance and devastating pathos.

©2016 David Szalay (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
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What listeners say about All That Man Is

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Relentlessly Depressing

Although Mr Szalay is a fine observer of life, in all its mundane detail; this book is relentlessly depressing.

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A Book That Sneaks Up On You

Beautifully written. Thoughtful. Seemingly unconnected stories that evoke a lifetime.
Beginning at at 17 and ending at 73, the stories are of a variety of men, all if whom are disoriented and away from home.

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Boring

Read if you enjoy a well written account about a series of men you would go out of your way to avoid in real life. A depressing account of just how venal men often are. I finished it only because I was curios as to what Szalay would do with these losers. They grow older and die Not a book I would recommend

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