Gyorgy Dragoman

Paul Olchvary

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.

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

Electric, ominous, urgent...a coming of age tale with a difference

Sprawling, urgent, spilling with detail...at once charming and disturbing'

Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated

The structure suggests the way we tend to pluck an episode, a cluster of related encounters, from our past and endow it with an organic unity. Dragoman's method of presentation here greatly reinforces his novel's authenticity...imaginatively stimulating.

Dragoman's lucid, energetic prose mingles this rite of passage scariness with the heart-in-mouth adrenalin of adolescence in the growing confidence of Datje's compelling voice.

A darkly fascinating examination of the contrast between childhood innocence and a totalitarian regime...a moving insight into a bizarre, tragic period of Europe's history

This vivid portrait of a childhood in totalitarian Europe [has a] momentum that is irresistible, in which the unspoken story at the heart of the book comes into focus with the full force of an all too real nightmare

Politics and history come to life when you catch them unawares on the pavements and playing fields of childhood

D. B. C. Pierre, Booker prize-winning author of VERNON GOD LITTLE

Dragoman conveys Djata's fearsome mental landscape with unadorned run-on sentences, skilfully building a totalitarian world simulataneously immersive and repulsive

An excellent, unusual novel, The White King presents a refreshing alternative to the 'history' of the Eastern Bloc and two fingers to the concept of absolute surveillance

'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.

Gyorgy Dragoman

Praise for The White King

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 ...

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

A most impressive debut

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 ...

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

A most impressive debut

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 ...

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

A most impressive debut

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