Dead Heat

Winner of the 2015 Margo Award (Hungary) for best first book of prose

A coming-of-age story narrated in colloquial first-person by a seventeen-year-old, the translation is immediate and compelling.

Totth’s debut follows a group of disaffected teenage boys-16 or 17 years old-in contemporary Hungary. They are members of an elite competitive swim team, but also abuse alcohol, have a lot of sex with adolescent girls, drive cars fast, possibly run over an old man, and finally find themselves involved in a murder. They are the first generation of Hungarians to experience neither Nazi invasion nor Communist dictatorship, yet, deprived of the need to struggle against these forces, they find little meaning in life unless they are experiencing its extremes.

The author is the Hungarian translator of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy (as well as The Hunger Games), and their influence on his own work is clear.