TEHRAN – A Persian translation of Hungarian writer Gyorgy Dragoman’s book “The Bone Fire” has recently been published by Now Publications in Tehran.

Abolfazl Allahdadi is the translator of the book first released in 2018.

The book tells the story of thirteen-year-old Emma, who 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.

Gyorgy Dragoman is a Hungarian author and literary translator. His best-known work, “The White King” (2005) has been translated to at least 28 languages.

His first novel, “Genesis Undone”, was published in 2002. He has become famous because of his second book, “The White King”, which received very favorable reviews from many influential newspapers, such as The New York Times. It is a collection of loosely connected stories told by an 11-year-old boy waiting for his father to be released from politically motivated imprisonment.

Photo: A combination photo shows Gyorgy Dragoman and the front cover of the Persian edition of his book “The Bone Fire”. 

ABU/