The White King by György Dragomán

Translated from the original Hungarian by Paul Olchvary

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.

(From Publisher).

György Dragomán was born in Marosvásárhely, 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 the Attila József Prize, the Déry Tibor Prize, the Márai Sándor Prize and became a bestseller. It is due to be published in twenty languages. His first novel, Genesis Undone, was the winner of the Brody Prize for Best First Book in 2002. György Dragomán has been a film critic, journalist, translator, interpreter and web designer. Among the works he has translated into Hungarian are short stories, essays and texts by James Joyce, I. B. Singer, Neil Jordan, Ian McEwan and Micky Donelly. 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 wife and two children, and is at work on his next novel.