Many have got to know this book through a recent Netflix series by the same title.

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.

Eight-year-old Beth Harmon is quiet, sullen, and by all appearances unremarkable. This unloved child is put in an orphanage after her mother is killed in an auto accident. She lives a lonely life with only two friends. One is a tall black girl who is also unloved; the other is a secret friendship with the orphanage’s old janitor, who teaches her the game of chess.

Chess is a life-saving and inspirational experience for her that she becomes obsessed with. Her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control.

Chess gives her the only real joy in her life. But she also needs love and emotional support from others. In childhood, she begins using tranquilizers that were distributed free in the orphanage until it was declared that they were unsafe. When they become unavailable she begins stealing them. She occasionally steals money, too. In her mid-teens her adoptive mother gives her a beer, which she takes to like a duck to water.

At 16, she’s competing for the U.S. Open championship. The novel follows her chess career from playing with the janitor in the school basement to the major world tournament against the world’s top player, a Russian grand master, at the height of the Cold War.

Author Walter Stone Tevis (1928-1984) was an American novelist and short story writer.

(SD-Agencies)