'All That Man Is' is a story about modern man: working-class ex-grunt, pompous college student, the middle-aged loser, Russian oligarch, to name a few of them. 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. Dark and disturbing but also often comical, 'All That Man Is' is notable for the acute psychological penetration Szalay brings to bear on his characters. Steadily and mercilessly, as this thoughtfully conceived book progresses, every protagonist at the center of each chapter gets to be older than the last one, the weather gets colder, so the novel intensifies the psychological insight. Szalay is a master of a new kind of realism that reach with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos.