Booker

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., seen here in on Aug. 21, 2024, during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Ill. On Sunday, Book and his fiancee, Alexis Lewis, wed in two ceremonies, one in Newark, N.J., and the other in Washington, D.C. File Photo by David Banks/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 30 (UPI) — Sen. Cory Booker married his fiancee, Alexis Lewis, on Sunday in two ceremonies — one in his hometown of Newark, N.J., and one in hers, Washington, D.C.

The newlyweds announced their nuptials in a joint statement on Instagram that included photos from the ceremonies.

“Overflowing with gratitude,” the statement said. “We said ‘I do’ in two places that shaped us — Cory’s beloved Newark and Alexis’ hometown of Washington, D.C. — first at the courthouse, then with our families.

“Hearts full and so grateful,” the pair said.

Cory, 59, was the mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013. He was then elected to the U.S. Senate for the state of New Jersey, a seat he has held since.

He announced his engagement to Lewis in September.

In the post to Facebook, he said Lewis “transformed me, helping me to ground and center my inner life, and discover the joys of building a nurturing home with someone you love.”

Nearly a decade after his 2016 novel, “All That Man Is,” was passed over for the Booker Prize, David Szalay has taken home gold with his latest work, “Flesh.”

“Flesh,” Szalay’s sixth novel, follows István, a socially isolated Hungarian teen who through circumstances beyond his control is thrust into London’s upper echelon. In the coming decades, he finds himself caught between his traumatic past and growing appetite for prestige. Szalay is the first Hungarian British writer to receive the prestigious award, which he accepted at Monday’s ceremony in London with visible surprise.

“I felt ‘Flesh’ is quite a risky novel, a risky book. It felt risky to me writing it,” Szalay said in his acceptance speech.

“I think it’s very important that the publisher — the novel-making community, if I can put it like that — embraces that sense of risk rather than shuns it,” he said.

In the judges’ view, Szalay’s risks more than paid off, yielding an “extraordinary, singular novel.”

“The judges discussed the six books on the shortlist for more than five hours,” said Roddy Doyle, chair of the judging panel. “The book we kept coming back to, the one that stood out from the other great novels, was ‘Flesh’ — because of its singularity.”

“We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read,” he said.

Despite chronicling decades of István’s life, “Flesh,” through narrative omissions, leaves readers with an inscrutable protagonist they nonetheless remain deeply invested in.

“I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well,” Doyle said, adding that in “Flesh,” “Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter.”

The Booker Prize is an annual award given to the best English-language novel published in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“Flesh” triumphed over five other shortlisted books: Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” Andrew Miller’s “The Land in Winter,” Susan Choi’s “Flashlight,” Katie Kitamura’s “Audition” and Ben Markovits’ “The Rest of Our Lives.”

“Flesh” has also received praise from writer Zadie Smith and singer Dua Lipa, who selected the novel for her Service95 Book Club.

“I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a character who has so little to say as István and yet by the end of it I cared about him so deeply,” Lipa told Szalay in an October interview at the New York Public Library.

During their conversation, Szalay shared that while “Flesh” was the file name for the book on his computer, he never expected it to get to the final press.

Yet his team couldn’t think of another title more fitting for the novel.

“The kind of slight unease that I think it provokes, that sense of tawdriness, I think that they really fit the book, ultimately,” Szalay said.

Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has won the prestigious Booker prize for his novel Flesh, which tells the story of a tortured Hungarian emigre who makes and loses a fortune.

Szalay, 51, beat five other shortlisted authors, including Indian novelist Kiran Desai and the United Kingdom’s Andrew Miller, to claim the 50,000 British pound ($65,500) award at a ceremony in London on Monday.

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Written in spare prose, Slazay’s book recounts the life of taciturn Istvan, from a teenage relationship with an older woman through time as a struggling immigrant in the UK to a denizen of London high society.

“A meditation on class, power, intimacy, migration and masculinity, Flesh is a compelling portrait of one man, and the formative experiences that can reverberate across a lifetime,” organisers of the award ceremony in London said in a statement.

Accepting his trophy at London’s Old Billingsgate, Szalay thanked the judges for rewarding his “risky” novel.

He recalled asking his editor “whether she could imagine a novel called ‘Flesh’ winning the Booker Prize”.

“You have your answer,” he said.

In addition to the 50,000-pound ($67,000) prize for the winner, as well as 2,500-pound awards to each of the shortlisted authors and translators, the writers also gain a boost in popularity and benefit from increased book sales.

Szalay’s book was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that included Irish writer Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City actor Sarah Jessica Parker.

Doyle said that Flesh, a book “about living, and the strangeness of living”, emerged as the judges’ unanimous choice after a five-hour meeting.

“We had never read anything quite like it. It is, in many ways, a dark book but it is a joy to read,” said Doyle in a statement.

“I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author … is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe – almost to create – the character with him.”

Szalay, who was born in Canada, raised in the UK and lives in Vienna, was previously a Booker finalist in 2016 for All That Man Is, a series of stories about nine wildly different men.

Flesh was Szalay’s sixth work of fiction.

“Even though my father is Hungarian, I never felt entirely at home in Hungary. I suppose, I’m always a bit of an outsider there, and living away from the UK and London for so many years, I also had a similar feeling about London,” Szalay told BBC Radio.

“I really wanted to write a book that stretched between Hungary and London and involved a character who was not quite at home in either place.”

The frontrunners for this year’s prize, according to betting markets, were Miller for his early-1960s domestic drama The Land in Winter, and Desai for the globe-spanning saga The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel since The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize in 2006.

The other finalists were Susan Choi’s twisty family saga, Flashlight; Katie Kitamura’s tale of acting and identity, Audition; and Ben Markovits’s midlife-crisis road trip, The Rest of Our Lives.

The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and has established a reputation for transforming writers’ careers.

Its winners have included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood and Samantha Harvey, who took the 2024 prize for space station story, Orbital.

The separate category of the International Booker Prize was awarded in May to Indian writer and activist Banu Mushtaq for her novel, Heart Lamp, which tells 12 stories of the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.