“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.

Benedek Totth's profile page

Ildiko Noemi Nagy's profile page

Born in Hungary in 1977, Benedek Totth studied American literature and now works as an editor and translator in Budapest. His translations into Hungarian include works by Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs. Dead Heat, his first novel, caused a sensation in Hungary, where it won the Margó Prize for best first novel of the year. It has been published in translation in France and Slovakia.

Born in 1975 in Vancouver, Ildikó Noemi Nagy grew up in the United States and studied in Budapest at the Franz Liszt Music Academy and Eötvös Lóránd University. Her short story collection Eggyétörve (Broken in One) appeared in German translation. Her previous translations from Hungarian include Eva Fejos’s novels Bangkok Transit and Vacation in Naples.

Praise for Dead Heat

"Dead Heat is steeped in nihilism and intoxication, frequent violence and brutality, a casual acceptance (and frequent occurrence) of sexual assault. One wants to believe it's over the top, but the novel's accepting tone casts everything in the cold light of verisimilitude ... whereas history is said to be written by the winners, coming-of-age fiction tends to be written by, or of, the losers (to steal a label from Stephen King's IT), the outsiders, the underdogs. In Dead Heat, the focal characters are the local elite: members of a champion swim team, popular at school, with several members of the group coming from wealthy families. The disturbing levels of brutality, and their complete lack of consequences, may simply be a reflection of the way it has always been for the stars of the teen world, and the world at large ... However you analyze it, Dead Heat is a valuable read, and has the feel of an important book. Consider this an opportunity, then, to brace yourself for what you will find between the covers."—Toronto Star

"This is a satire of the bleakest strain: there is scarcely a page that does not offend. And yet the result is utterly enthralling … As savage, reckless, and abhorrent as the world Totth delivers is, what's worse is how frighteningly real it all feels. Dead Heat is an undeniably uncomfortable novel, but so too is the truth it's trying to get at."—Quill and Quire, starred review

"Totth's novel and its translation from the Hungarian by Nagy both excel … in conveying the banality and numbness as its narrator proceeds through this parade of horrors.The juxtaposition of transgressive behavior with competitive sports recalls nothing quite so much as Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. Like that book, the way in which this narrative is told makes for compelling reading even as the acts it describes can inspire shudders.Totth's debut is a harrowing experience but also a frequently gripping one."—Kirkus

"[Dead Heat's] internal tension never calcifies into numbness or cynicism — it never gets tiresome, but remains white-hot to the end ... The novel’s effect is cumulative rather than linear, and part of the story’s absorbing quality is how lurchingly unpredictable it is."—Michigan Daily

“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

“A brilliant novel, but brilliant like a black diamond and cursed so that you don’t want to hold it, a tale that never lets you go, no matter how much repugnance you may feel.”—Encre Noire

“Intense, brutal and relentless. As on a mad merry-go-round, you’re delighted not to be able to get off before it’s over. But watch out: the harsh form and subject matter will leave more modest readers shaken.”—TéléStar

“Dead Heat is about an empty world . . . its language full of slang, its elocution prizing sexuality, violence and luxury goods. Its hallucinatory moments call to mind classics of 20th-century American literature like Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Carver or Hunter S. Thompson, or the cult movie Trainspotting and the violence of youth at its centre reminds us of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.”—Magyar Narancs

"A savage world where teenagers roam like zombies high on drugs . . . a whirling sequence of fast-paced movie scenes, sharp dialogues and luxuriant visions.”—Szépirodalmi Figyelo

“Dead Heat is a no-holds-barred portrait of adolescents adrift . . . The blue waters of the Danube have never looked this troubled.”—Paris Match

“Benedek Totth darkens his pages with a boundless talent. He writes like a man screaming, moved by furious desperation. Totth’s dialogues show that he understands the power of humour, and he also knows that the world moves too fast and leaves those who don’t know how to swim at the edge of the pool. A devastating, beautiful Noir novel.”—L’Express (Paris)