All That Man Is

David Szalay's book links nine stories about nine men, each at a different stage of life and each away from home, from two English teenagers arriving in Berlin to an aging diplomat recovering from heart surgery in an Italian villa. Between them come a man working half-heartedly in his uncle's shop near Lille who takes a holiday in Cyprus, a Danish tabloid editor who brings down his country's defense minister, and a disgraced Russian oligarch. Each protagonist is older than the one before, so the sequence runs from youth to old age across a Europe of motorways, Alpine villages and Prague suburbs. It won the Gordon Burn Prize and reached the Man Booker Prize shortlist in 2016.

It was among the books former Westpac chief executive Gail Kelly named in a What CEOs are reading feature.