Orphan Beth Harmon overcomes her fears and shyness by learning to play chess and, over the years, improves her game to become a national champion and to play the world grandmasters.

Readers can learn all the rules of chess with annotated photsequences and advice on the game from a top game expert.

When an overseas telephone conversation traps Veronica into agreeing to play a renowned chess champion, she decides that she needs to learn how to play the game.

2003, Colorado: Alexandra Solarin is summoned home to her family's ancestral Rocky Mountain hideaway for her mother's birthday. Thirty years ago, her parents, Cat Velis and Alexander Solarin, believed that they had scattered the pieces of the Montglane Service around the world, burying with them the secrets of the power that comes with possessing it. But Alexandra arrives to find that her mother is missing and that a series of strategically placed...

Vowing to avenge the murder of her family, Maria, a young Polish resistance worker imprisoned in Auschwitz, plays chess in exchange for her life, and, in doing so, challenges the man who destroyed her family to one last game that will end in either failure or justice. A member of the Polish underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Maria Florkowska is captured by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Auschwitz. Her family is sent to their deaths; she...

"A father-son chess tournament reveals the dark side of the game"--

"As the Great War rages, an independent young woman struggles to sustain love-and life-through the power of words. It's 1917 and America is on the brink of World War I. After Hensley Dench's father is forced to resign from the New York Times for his anti-war writings, she finds herself expelled from the life she loves and the future she thought she would have. Instead, Hensley is transplanted to New Mexico, where her father has taken a job overseeing...