Colin Sheridan: The Booker shows what we're willing to celebrate — a new, questioning, masculinity

The 'death of the introspective male novel' has been greatly exaggerated — see Karl Ove Knausgaard’s newest nine-volume, 6,000-page meditation on the misery of being alive

David Szalay's 'Flesh', winner of the 2025 Booker Prize.  The brilliance of the novel — what judges called its 'singularity' — lies in how it refuses the old macho tropes while borrowing their scaffolding.  Picture: Ian West/PA

In the wake of Flesh by David Szalay claiming the 2025 Booker Prize, one can’t help asking: Have we finally halted the slow collapse of masculinity in literature? 

Was that supposed decline simply a ruse, or simply another correction, perhaps even an over-correction, in an industry long overdue for one?