As a child, Paul Hoffman lost himself in chess. The award- winning author of the international bestseller The Man Who Loved Only Numbers played to escape the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, happily passing weekends with his brilliant bohemian father in New York’s Greenwich Village, the epicenter of American chess. But he soon learned that such single-minded focus came at a steep price, as the pressure of competition drove him to the edge of madness. As an adolescent, Hoffman loved the artistic purity of the game -- and the euphoria he felt after a hard-fought victory -- but he was disturbed by the ugly brutality and deceptive impulses that tournament chess invariably brought out in his opponents and in himself. Plagued by strange dreams in which attractive women moved like knights and sinister men like bishops, he finally gave up the game entirely in college, for the next twenty-five years.

In King’s Gambit, Hoffman interweaves gripping tales from the history of the game and revealing portraits of contemporary chess geniuses into the emotionally charged story of his own recent attempt to get back into tournament chess as an adult -- this time without losing his mind or his humanity. All the while, he grapples with the bizarre, confusing legacy of his own father, who haunts Hoffman’s game and life.

In this insider’s look at the obsessive subculture of championship chess, the critically acclaimed author applies the techniques that garnered his earlier work such lavish praise -- the novelistic storytelling and the keen insights -- to his own life and the eccentric, often mysterious lives of the chess pros he knew and has come to know. Intimate, surprising, and often humorous, it’s both Hoffman’s most personal work and his most compelling.