György Dragomán

“Anything can happen in The Bone Fire—and everything does. 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, bestselling author of Inland and The Tiger's Wife From an award-winning and internationally acclaimed European writer: A chilling and suspenseful novel set in the wake of a violent revolution about a young girl rescued from an orphanage by an otherworldly grandmother she’s never met 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—like a witch's apprentice—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. The Bone Fire is a political Gothic, carried along by the menace and promise of a fairy tale.

The Bone Fire

Gyorgy Dragoman

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, Gy rgy Dragom n won the prestigious S ndor M rai prize. An urgent, humorous and melancholy picture of a childhood behind the Iron Curtain it introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.

The White King

An international sensation, this startling and heartbreaking debut introduces us to precocious eleven-year-old Djata, whose life in the totalitarian state he calls home is about to change forever. Djata doesn’t know what to make of the two men who lead his father away one day, nor does he understand why his mother bursts into tears when he brings her tulips on her wedding anniversary. He does know that he must learn to fill his father’s shoes, even though among his friends he is still a boy: fighting with neighborhood bullies, playing soccer on radioactive grass, having inappropriate crushes, sneaking into secret screening rooms, and shooting at stray cats with his gun-happy grandfather. But the random brutality of Djata’s world is tempered by the hilarious absurdity of the situations he finds himself in, by his enduring faith in his father’s return, and by moments of unexpected beauty, hope, and kindness. Structured as a series of interconnected stories propelled by the energy of Dragomán’s riveting prose, the chapters of The White King collectively illuminate the joys and humiliations of growing up, while painting a multifaceted and unforgettable portrait of life in an oppressive state and its human cost. And as in the works of Mark Haddon, David Mitchell, and Marjane Satrapi, Djata’s child’s-eye view lends power and immediacy to his story, making us laugh and ache in recognition and reminding us all of our shared humanity.

A Novel

Oroszlánkórus

Nach der Beerdigung seiner Mutter kehrt Ferenczi nicht in die leere Wohnung zurück, sondern fliegt nach Madrid. Auf dem Hotelbalkon an der Puerta del Sol, während von unten »Tanzmusik, Freudenmusik und Trauermusik« heraufdringt, geht ihm durch den Kopf, wie anders das Leben verlaufen wäre, hätten die kommunistischen Behörden seinen Eltern nicht die Hochzeitsreise nach Spanien verweigert – das Hotel an der Puerta del Sol war schon gebucht. Sein Vater wäre nicht in den Bergen verunglückt, und seine Mutter hätte ihre Gesangskarriere gemacht, statt putzen zu gehen. Wie Stimmen einer Partitur verflechten sich die langen, dichten Sätze und lassen Sequenzen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart einander durchdringen. »Dass der Schmerz irgendwann nachließ, davon handelte die Musik«, sagt eine Sängerin, die ihr Leben lang mit Ella Fitzgeralds Cry me a river auftritt und Glück und Qual einer Musikerexistenz bis zum Ende durchstehen muss. Musik als Leidenschaft, Wunschtraum und Fluch, als Katalysator des Übersinnlichen und als Auslöserin von Katastrophen – all diese Motive wandern durch die zwanzig Novellen, aus denen György Dragomán seinen mächtigen Löwenchor zusammengestellt hat.

György Dragomán

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