Few books arrive with the quiet confidence of The Scandal That Roiled the Chess World in 2022. From its first page, Dylan Loeb McClain writes as though the only honest sentence is the one already on the table.

Ben Mezrich's Checkmate revisits the controversy surrounding Magnus Carlsen, Hans Niemann, and the biggest cheating scandal modern chess has ever faced.

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

A Question of Form

Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.

“The book does not ask to be admired. It asks to be lived with.”

The dialogue is doing several jobs at once. It tells us where we are. It tells us who is listening. And, more rarely, it tells us what the silence between two people actually costs.

The prose moves like weather. Sentences gather, break, gather again. What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity — the writer trusting the reader to feel the storm without being shown the lightning.

A Question of Form

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

The Scandal That Roiled the Chess World in 2022 is the kind of book that ends and then keeps ending — in conversations the next morning, in margins revisited a week later, in sentences that surface, unbidden, on long walks.