Dead Heat

“Let’s say it up front: reading Dead Heat, the Hungarian writer Benedek Totth’s first novel, is a shock ... [like] the cry of love and desperation flung out by a generation that’s finished before it can begin, before it can even reach maturity.”—Yann Perreau, Les Inrockuptibles

Adrift in testosterone and booze, teenage members of a competitive swim team prowl the nighttime clubs and highways of Budapest. Their parents and coaches, demoralized and debased by decades of totalitarian rule, either pay them no attention or too much of the wrong kind. When the boys aren’t setting records in the pool, they’re treating old men, young women, and animals that happen into their path as objects at their disposal—but after their recklessness explodes into violence, one of them must find resources in both his heart and his disciplined swimmer's body to confront his responsibility for a horrific crime. Brilliantly translated into breakneck English by Ildikó Noémi Nagy, Dead Heat is a blistering debut and a harrowing, indelible story about young men coming of age in an abandoned generation.