I can't remember now how this book was recommended to me. I thought it had been mentioned by Glen , but now I can't find any mention of it on his site. Maybe it was the review on Bookslut , but I don't see how that would have driven me to purchase a copy. At any rate, I did get a copy a couple of months ago, and lookee here, now I've read it.

The Queen's Gambit is a fictional biography of Beth Harmon, an orphan, drug addict, and chess prodigy. It describes her rise from a Kentucky orphanage to the heights of the chess world. Along the way, she suffers from drug and alcohol addiction, and from poisonous personal relationships.

This is not a novel about chess per se, but chess does make up the warp and weft of the story. Tevis does an admirable job of making the many chess matches into compelling storytelling. I'm not a chess player, but I was intrigued by his accounts of strategy and of the shifting balance of power between two players.

Tevis's prose is workmanlike. There isn't a descriptive metaphor to be found in the entire novel. Instead, the plot holds center stage, and the sentences are as simple and direct as they could possibly be. I'm not usually a big fan of that style of writing, but it works here. [Before writing these notes, I read the first few pages of Gibson's Pattern Recognition — the writing style could hardly be more of a contrast.]