The White King

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

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

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

A most impressive debut

Paul Bailey, Independent

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

Daily Mail

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

Financial Times

Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated

The Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

A most impressive debut

Paul Bailey, Independent

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

Daily Mail

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

Financial Times

Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated

The Times

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

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

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

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

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

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