The Pawn

In this gripping historical saga, award-winning Spanish writer Paco Cerdà explores early Cold War anxieties through the lens of a famous chess match.

Stockholm, 1962. Spain’s first chess grandmaster, Arturito Pomar, faces off against eighteen-year-old American prodigy Bobby Fischer in a match that will become the stuff of legend, not so much for how it ends but for what it symbolizes. Shuttling back and forth across decades between the United States, Spain, the Soviet Union, and beyond, The Pawn tracks the careers of the two chess masters, expertly examining the geopolitical anxieties that pervaded the 1960s and went on to shape these men’s lives.

Perfect for fans of The Storm We Made and The Queen’s Gambit, The Pawn explores the contentious shadow layers between game and politic, match and war, pawn and political tool. In this empathetic, incisive rendering, Cerdà “presents both players as among the many exceptional people whose lives were sacrificed on the altar of Cold War interests” (The New York Times).