THE PUBLICATION OF a new novel by David Szalay is an event for anyone who cares about fiction. He is one of a handful of writers who seem to have been born whole as novelists, arriving equipped with insight, wit, curiosity, and an unmistakable voice. He is Zadie Smith good, Eleanor Catton good. Like them, he won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize for first novels by Commonwealth writers under 35, for London and the South-East (2008). He has not yet, like Catton, won the Booker, but, like Smith, he has been a finalist for it, with All That Man Is (2016); the book’s title is an accurate gauge of Szalay’s ambition.
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