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.

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

A most impressive debut

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

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

Disturbing, compelling, beautifully translated

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.

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.

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

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

Politics and history come to life when you catch them unawares on the pavements and playing fields of childhood

Dragoman conveys Djata's fearsome mental landscape with unadorned run-on sentences, skilfully building a totalitarian world simulataneously immersive and repulsive

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

Quite simply, the master of comic writing at work

To pick up a Wodehouse novel is to find oneself in the presence of genius - no writer has ever given me so much pure enjoyment

Compulsory reading for anyone who has a pig, an aunt - or a sense of humour!

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

The greatest comic writer ever

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

Sublime comic genius

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour