"Eight-year-old orphan Beth Harmon is quiet, sullen, and by all appearances unremarkable. That is until she plays her first game of chess. Her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control. By the age of sixteen, she's competing for the U.S. Open championship. But as Beth hones her skills on the professional circuit, the stakes get higher, her isolation grows more frightening,...

"Epic in scope, The Partisan is a thrill ride that takes readers from the hallowed halls of Cambridge to the grimy depths of the Moscow underworld, from 1960s London to the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Summer 1961: The brutal Cold War between East and West is becoming ever more perilous. Two young prodigies from either side of the Iron Curtain, Yulia and Michael, meet at a chess tournament in London. They don't know it, but they’re...

'What do you do for fun?', Johnny Carson asked Bobby Fischer when he appeared on the Tonight Show shortly after he had become world chess champion. Bobby looked at Carson as if he'd lost his marbles and replied, dead earnest, 'I play chess.'Bobby Fischer's lone fight against the Soviet chess powerhousemade hima global hero, also for people who did not play chess at all. The Russians trembled before him, the Americans and the rest of the world cheered...

In the tradition of The Professor and the Madman, Longitude, and The Orchid Thief, Hallman transforms an obsessive quest for obscure things into a compulsively readable and entertaining weaving of travelogue, journalism, and chess history. In the tiny Russian province of Kalmykia, obsession with chess has reached new heights. Its leader, a charismatic and eccentric millionaire/ex-car salesman named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is a former chess prodigy and...