Chess Novel

Anyone looking to read a novel about the world of chess should read "The Dragon Variation" by Anthony Glyn. I found it to be a very entertaining, well written story.

How about "The Luzhin Defence"? Great book.

I'll try it. I read "The Dragon Variation" some time ago and I enjoyed it immensely.

I am reading Chess For Dummies, Horowitz's Point Count Chess or something like that, and My System by Nizmo...

No plots, interesting characters, crazy endings...oopsie, not novels!!

I would love to read a novel right now but I suck at chess and am just learning so no fiction until I can play better. 

Thanks John, I'll read it. Also, try Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett- it's a great suspense novel with a chess game woven into the plot

Any book entitled "Zugzwang" is a must read!

I suggest "The Chess Machine" by Robert Lohr. It is translated from German but is a great read. A fictional book about the first operator of "The Turk."

An eight Pawn book.

I was going to recommend "The Defense," by Vladimir Nabokov, but it turns out this is the same as "The Luzhin Defense," already recommended.  So that's 2 for Nabokov!  (It's one of his early, Russian novels, and the translators differ, I guess.)

There is another book called "The Eight" that is a best seller and well the review is below. It is a better read than the "Davinci Code" and more exciting too.

"Katherine Neville's debut novel is a postmodern thriller set in 1972 ... and 1790. In the 20th century, Catherine Velis is a computer expert with a flair for music, painting, and chess who, on her way to Algeria at the behest of the accounting firm where she is employed, is invited to take a mysterious moonlighting assignment: recover the pieces of an old chess set missing for centuries.

In the midst of the French Revolution, a young novice discovers that her abbey is the hiding place of a chess set, once owned by the great Charlemagne, which allows those who play it to tap into incredible powers beyond the imagination. She eventually comes into contact with the major historical figures of the day, from Robespierre to Napoleon, each of whom has an agenda."

_The Eight_ has some fun sequences, but the author's view of competitive chess is a weird projection of the 18th or 19th century into the present day--world championships decided by privately agreed matches, that sort of thing.  And the main plot is not very chessical:  the people in the story are supposed to somehow correspond to pieces, but nothing's really done with it.  All in all I found it a weak book.

Walter Tevis' _The Queen's Gambit_ is a novel about a female chess prodigy.  Tevis is not a great player and it shows (the protagonist's thought processes are more B-player than GM) but he nailed a lot of things about being a young female chessplayer in a way that really matches up with my experience.