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
 

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 is finally sent home again.

In the mean time, 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.

Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated
The Times

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.
Financial Times

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

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

A most impressive debut
Paul Bailey Independent

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
Glasgow Herald

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
Literary Review

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
Metro

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

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

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.
Paul Binding Times Literary Supplement

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