When David Szalay’s spare, quietly devastating novel Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize, it prompted conversations about modern masculinity, the long echo of unresolved trauma and the consequences of a life shaped more by circumstance than agency.

In Breton Duke’s Party Boy, a harried husband and father approaches his 50th birthday and finds that the strategies he’s long used to numb or outrun the events of his youth are failing him.

Scottish writer Michael Pedersen’s memoir Boy Friends is a tender, life-affirming tribute to a friend lost to suicide, and a manifesto for the sustaining power of male friendship and honest communication.

They join Adam Dudding to discuss their books, and the vital questions they raise about what it means to be a man today.