The White King

(Paperback)

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Description

In the tradition of A CURIOUS INCIDENT and BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS- a young boy in a totalitarian state in a quest for his disappeared father 'Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated' The Times 'Electric, urgent, luminous ... a coming-of-age with a difference' Daily Mail Eleven-year-old Djata makes sure he is always home on Sundays. It is the day the State Security came to take his father away, and he believes it will be a Sunday when his father finally comes home again. While he waits, Djata lives out a life of adventure. He plays wargames in flaming wheat fields; hunts for gold in abandoned claymines; watches porn in a backroom at the cinema, and plays chess with an automaton. But lurking beneath his rebel boyhood, pulling at his heartstrings, is the continued absence of his father. When he finally uncovers the real truth, he risks losing his childhood for ever. With THE WHITE KING, Gy rgy Dragoman won the prestigious Sandor Marai prize. An urgent, humorous and melancholy picture of a childhood behind the Iron Curtain it introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.

Reviews

It's the Just William books teamed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four; a superb novel about childhood, schooldays and gang fights...Dragomn lets the narrative rip, shifting the characters around like he's Stephen King or Elmore Leonard...sums up the lunacy of Ceausescu's regime better than anything else I've read. -- Tibor Fischer * Guardian *
Dragoman is superb at the paraphernalia of boyhood...so much intense experience is on offer...a poignant and big-hearted book, firing the imagination long after the pages have stopped turning -- Charles Fernyhough * Sunday Telegraph *
A most impressive debut -- Paul Bailey * Independent *
Electric, ominous, urgent...a coming of age tale with a difference * Daily Mail *
Sprawling, urgent, spilling with detail...at once charming and disturbing' * Financial Times *

Author Bio

Gy rgy Dragoman was born in Marosvasarhely, Transylvania in 1973 and moved to Hungary when he was fifteen. The White King was first published in its original Hungarian in 2005 where it won prizes and is now an iconic bestseller. It is now published in over thirty languages and has been made into a highly acclaimed English-language film. Dragoman works as a translator- among the works he has translated into Hungarian are short stories, essays and texts by James Joyce, I. B. Singer, Neil Jordan and Ian McEwan. The two most difficult novels he has ever translated are Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and Samuel Beckett's Watt. He lives in Budapest with his family.