A List of Chess Fiction
Explore the best chess fiction books with our curated list of novels and stories centered around the game of chess. Perfect for chess lovers and readers alike!
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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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Alekhine's Anguish
by Charles D. Yaffe
This is a fictionalized account of the life and career of world chess champion Alexander Alekhine. Born into Russian nobility, Alekhine lost his family and nearly his life to the Bolsheviks before becoming the world's most powerful chess player. The coming of World War II placed the grandmaster in a difficult position, forcing him to collaborate with the Nazis and to produce anti-Semitic materials. Desperate to win back his credibility after the war, Alekhine was preparing for a redemptive title match at the time of his sudden death. Alekhine's life was marked by alcoholism, fits of depression, scandalous affairs, marriages of convenience, painful compromises, and his battle to become "the Greatest." The novel is told as fiction but is based on the actual people and events that were part of his triumphant career and troubled life.
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The Queen's Gambit
by Walter Tevis
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Engaging and fast-paced, this gripping coming-of-age novel of chess, feminism, and addiction speeds to a conclusion as elegant and satisfying as a mate in four. Now a highly acclaimed, award-winning Netflix series. 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, and the thought of escape becomes all the more tempting.
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The Chess Companion
by Irving Chernev
America's foremost author of chess instruction books and a veritable encyclopedia of chess lore, Irving Chernev has culled his favorite and funniest anecdotes...to delight players of eveyr taste and talent. The second half of the book is devoted to action on the board".--Page 4 of cover.
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Gambit
by Rex Stout
Archie Goodwin and the great detective tackle a tough case - the murder of an eccentric chess player.
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Chess Story
by Stefan Zweig
Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological. Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story. This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.
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The Royal Game & Other Stories
by Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig gained early fame as a poet, translator, and biographer. When he added fiction to his repertoire, his work was critically acclaimed. However, Zweig has fallen into an undeserved obscurity, and unlike the works of his contemporaries and admirers--fellow Austrian and German writers such as Thomas Man, Herman Hesse, and Sigmund Freud--Zweig's writings have become almost completely unavailable to the English-speaking audience. The Royal Game and Other Stories is a collection of five of his brilliant creative achievements, revives Zweig's art, making it once again available to a wide range of readers. Spanning his entire career, the stories included-""The Royal Game,"" ""Amok,"" ""Letter from an Unknown Woman,"" ""The Burning Secret,"" and ""Fear""-each reveal an individual's passionate response to life. Toying with the theme of the mind left to itself, Zweig gives the reader everything from the story of a child's distrust of his mother to one of a man driven to insanity by his imaginary chess games. Zweig's enormous interest in psychology and psychological problems combine with early century settings to provide compelling stories that prove Zweig to be a master of psychological narrative. Through the years, the stories of Stefan Zweig have been hailed as intense and memorable psychological thrillers-adventures of the mind-with wide, universal appeal. The five masterpieces in this book reveal why Zweig has earned such praise, and should help his legacy continue on to a new generation of readers.
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The Great Pawn Hunter Chess Tutorial
by Manus Patrick Fealy
The best way to become a champion chess player is by playing over complete games. Manus's stories and poetry are meant to lift you up between each game. After all, only chess and chess only, makes a tired chess player. Many of the things that the characters in the chess stories do are gained from the experiences of Manus's childhood in the neighborhoods of Boston. So sit back, grab a board and the book and enjoy a tall tale, a poem and exciting games. Here's a word from a grand checker player, his late father, God bless him: He said, "Manus, sharpen your gippy to avoid a bad turn." So, he says the same to you. God bless and good chess.
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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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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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When Pawns Rebel
by Hattan Turki
When Pawns Rebel is a journey that a pawn takes through the demanding environment of the board while a game is in process. The pawn changes his mind and his sense of right and wrong with every convincing argument that he hears. After making up his mind on what his life should be about and events and his status do not satisfy his newly found goals, does he cave in and let life take its usual course or will he attempt to alter his destiny and the destiny of all the other pawns on the board? Will the other pawns agree with him on what's best for them or will they oppose him? And what will the major pieces do once they find out about him and his conspiracy to strip them away of their superiority over the pawns? How will all that happened effect the game and will it have an effect on other boards? Making connections between the pawn and one self on an occasion or another should not be difficult.
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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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Engaging Pieces
by Howard Goldowsky
Engaging Pieces is a celebration of chess journalism at its best. Here, in one volume, is a collection of interviews with some of the most charismatic personalities of the chess world: Michael de la Maza (who gained over 700 USCF rating points in 700 days), Mig Greengard (one of the world's best chess journalists), Hikaru Nakamura (the rising American star), Jen Shahade (two-time US Women's Champion and author of Chess Bitch), Team Hydra (the brains behind the world's strongest chess computer), plus many others. Rounding out the book is a collection of six chess-related short stories and four chess-related articles.