Tom Gatti has some very nice things to say about The White King in The Times.

When my old English teacher tried to teach me the language back in Transylvania, on very special occasions, when I excelled in the drills, she opened one of her cupboards to get some of her treasured yellowed copies of The Times: We would then read a short passage at random. This was the biggest imaginable reward, with a taste of the forbidden. I am not sure that reading twenty-year-old copies of The Times would have actually landed us in trouble, but we certainly felt so. Because of these memories, I must admit to a certain degree of elation upon seeing my own name in that paper:

“…a child protagonist isn’t guaranteed an easy ride: in Twain and Dickens there is a palpable tension between the childish world of imaginative freedom and the adult world of darkness, violence, injustice and greed. In The White King, that tension is stretched to breaking point. For its narrator Djata, the horrors of the adult world are everywhere. This disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated novel – the first by the Hungarian György Dragomán to be published in English, and winner of the Sándor Márai Prize – is set in an unnamed totalitarian, communist regime, based on the nationalist, Stalinist, poverty-stricken Romania of the 1980s where Dragomán grew up.”

The full text is here.