The Queen’s Gambit (1983) - Walter Tevis torrent

Category: Adults, Classic, Contemporary, Suspense
Language: English
Keywords: Addiction Chess Professional Competition

Written by Walter Tevis
Read by Amy Landon
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: December 11, 2018
Duration: 11:51:01

When eight-year-old Beth Harmon’s parents are killed in an automobile accident, she is placed in an orphanage in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. Plain and shy, Beth learns to play chess from the janitor in the basement and discovers she is a prodigy. Though penniless, she is desperate to learn more—and steals a chess magazine and enough money to enter a tournament. Beth also steals some of her foster mother’s tranquilizers to which she is becoming addicted.

At thirteen, Beth wins the chess tournament. By the age of sixteen she is competing in the US Open Championship and, like Fast Eddie in The Hustler, she hates to lose. By eighteen she is the US champion—and Russia awaits.

Fast-paced and elegantly written, The Queen’s Gambit is a thriller masquerading as a chess novel—one that’s sure to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Reader comments…” The Queens Gambit is about professional chess in the same way that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is about professional tennis. That is to say, the core of the book is about how we use our talents to destroy ourselves. In this it is sImilar to Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story which, although written three quarters of a century ago, carries the same warning about the same game.”

“This is, quite simply, a fantastic novel. Wholly immersive, exciting, and human, it combines in completely satisfying prose the the unlikely pairing of a fascinating portrait of a brilliant and complicated young woman with the page-turning suspense of a great thriller in its depiction of high-stakes chess tournaments. I love chess, and I wonder how readers who don’t would feel about this novel, but for me Tevis elegantly and accessibly makes manifest the particular and singular joy of discovering elegant and surprising moves and combinations, and pulling them off.”