A Chess Story

Description

On an ocean liner heading for Buenos Aires, the chess world champion is playing, and winning, against a group of fellow passengers, until a stranger steps forward from the watching crowds. How can this man, who claims not to have moved a piece in twenty years, challenge the Grand Master? As the game unfolds, so, gradually, does the truth of the stranger's dark and damaged past-an unnerving tale of tyranny, imprisonment and obsession.

A staunch pacifist after his time in the Ministry of War during the First World War, Stefan Zweig was, at his peak, one of the bestselling and most widely acclaimed authors in the world. Following Hitler's rise to power, he and his second wife fled Austria; first to England, then to America, and finally, in 1940, they travelled together to Brazil, where the couple took an overdose and died. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game. Never mind that you may have never moved a pawn to King four; the story will grip you. Economist The novella is one of Zweig's most horrifying investigations into monomania and at the same time a parable of the dangers inherent in engaging with Nazism. -- Ruth Franklin London Review of Books A Chess Story by Stefan Zweig; the games our minds play. -- Candia McWilliam Glasgow Herald