White King

'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.

György Dragomán was born in Marosvásárhely, Transylvania in 1973 and moved to Hungary when he was fifteen.The White Kingwas 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'sTrainspottingand Samuel Beckett'sWatt. He lives in Budapest with his family.

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