The Royal Game

THE CLASSIC INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A new edition of this classic Zweig story - an epic chess match on a translatlantic liner during WW2 unearths a story of persecution and obsession On the deck of a transatlantic ocean liner, a crowd of passengers gathers to watch reigning chess world champion Mirko Czentovic take on a series of amateur challengers. The haughty grandmaster dispatches all of his opponents with ease, until one Dr B steps forward from the crowd - a passionate lover of the royal game who still bears the mental scars of imprisonment by the Nazis in his native Austria. The enigmatic genius reluctantly agrees to challenge Czentovic, but at what cost to his sanity? Written during the Second World War, The Royal Game was the great Stefan Zweig's final work - a searing, suspenseful tale of psychological torment and the price of obsession.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular works including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, and later on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where he wrote The Royal Game in 1941. In 1942 Zweig and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.