The White King - Softcover

"It's the Just William books teamed up with Nineteen Eighty-Four; a superb novel about childhood, schooldays and gang fights...Dragomán 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)

'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, György Dragomán won the prestigious Sándor Márai prize. An urgent, humorous and melancholy picture of a childhood behind the Iron Curtain it introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.