Gyorgy Dragomán – författare

"A story in which dreams and phantasms are kinder . . . than the random brutality of the concrete world. . . . [the] telling is not just magic, but enchantment." —Rebecca Makkai, New York Times Book Review  Thirteen-year-old Emma grows up under an Eastern European dictatorship where oppression seems eternal. When her dissident parents die in a car accident, she''s taken to an orphanage, only to be adopted soon after by a grandmother she has never met. While her homeland is shattered by a violent revolution, Emma comes to learn the ways of her new grandmother, who can tell fortunes from coffee dregs, cause and heal pain at will, and shares her home with the ghost of her husband. But this is not the main reason her grandmother is treated with suspicion and contempt by most people in town. They suspect her or her husband of having been involved in the disappearance of top secret government files. As Emma learns her family history, she begins to see that, for her grandparents, the alternate reality shaped by magic was their only form of freedom.  A New York Times Editors'' Choice "Dragomán puts us in the middle of our most wondrous and terrifying childhood fairytales, somehow unhazing their dreaminess and replicating their electrifying uncertainty all at once." —Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of Inland and The Tiger''s Wife "As sinister as it is stunningly beautiful. It is the work of a master." —Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth "Nested in this novel''s magical setting is the darkly-glinting stone of a turbulent political history of secrets, betrayals, ghosts, and memory. . . . It will pierce you like a knitting needle." —Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize wininng author of Twice Alive

'Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated' The Times'Electric, urgent, luminous ... a coming-of-age with a difference' Daily MailEleven-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.