Chess literature for adults
Explore the best chess literature for adults with our curated list of top books. Improve strategy, learn advanced tactics, and master the game with expert-recommended reads.
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The Eight
by Katherine Neville
Computer expert Cat Velis is heading for a job to Algeria. Before she goes, a mysterious fortune teller warns her of danger, and an antique dealer asks her to search for pieces to a valuable chess set that has been missing for years...In the South of France in 1790 two convent girls hide valuable pieces of a chess set all over the world, because the game that can be played with them is too powerful....
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The Flanders Panel
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
While restoring a fifteenth-century masterpiece, Julia, a young art expert in Madrid, stumbles upon a real-life mystery as she sets out to find the killer responsible for a five-hundred-year-old murder and becomes the target of modern-day intrigue, betrayal, and death. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
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The Luneburg Variation
by Paolo Maurensig
At the opening of this amazing fiction, a cadaver is discovered, the body of a wealthy businessman from Vienna, apparently a suicide without plausible motivation. Next to the body is a chessboard made of rags with buttons for pieces whose positions on the board may hold the only clue. As the plot of this passionately colored, coolly controlled thriller unfolds, we meet two chess players--one a clever, persecuted Jew, the other a ruthless, persecuting German--who have faced each other many times before and played for stakes that are nothing less than life itself.
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ID: 0345234367
(Type: books)
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The Chess Team (A Novel)
by James Sawaski
Jim Berzchak has a gift. His capabilities in the game of chess are remarkable and his brain works at levels most people only dream about. However, a horrific blunder while playing at the high school state tournament costs his Escanaba Eskimos the team championship. Depressed, he slips into a world of solitude. His life stalls and although he studies chess aggressively and enhances his skills, other aspects to his well being become reclusive. 15 years later a group of high school students coax Jim into reopening the defunct chess program. Through the kids, he finds he has an even better gift, the ability to teach the game and make it exciting. "The Eskychess Express is back on track!" or so it seems. Issues abound with their newfound success. Personal problems infect the team. Opponents take notice and hone their skills to incomprehensible levels. The pressure of competition makes Jim feel like collapsing. Can he get his life in order and lead his Eskimos over the second place hump? Or will they end up like him, devastated in life because they pinned too many hopes on winning a state championship title?
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Los Voraces 2019
by Andy Soltis
The rules of "The Greatest Tournament in Chess History," the $20 million Sheldrake Memorial Tournament, a.k.a. Los Voraces 2019, are: no seconds, no agents, no computers, no entourages, no pagers, no power palms, no phone calls--no outside contact of any kind--as the fourteen greatest chess players in the world gather to compete for money and fame. These geniuses of the game are strange characters--including two Russian world champions solely responsible for article 17.1 of FIDE's Laws of Chess (the "anti-hair-pull rule"), the Rumanian who speaks a "kind of personal Esperanto, using odds and ends of other languages," and a possible member of the Russian mafia--and when the tournament begins with the death of the ninth highest rated player in the world, everyone is under suspicion. This fabulous chess novel is full of game scores and diagrams--some pretty amazing games are played at Los Voraces! It's all told from the point of view of the arbiter, who is quickly drawn from his role as observer to that of target and suspect. By the time the tournament has only five rounds to go, five corpses have been discovered. Just who is the serial killer with a preference for 2700+ rated grandmasters? This edition is a revision, with illustrations, of a serialized electronic version run by Hanon Russell on ChessCafe from September 2001 to September 2002.
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ID: 0140230386
(Type: books)
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The Chess Artist
by J. C. Hallman
Exploring the obsessive hold chess exerts over its followers, Hallman examines the history and evolution of the game and the people who dedicate their lives to it.
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ID: 1576466248
(Type: books)