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Title: Zugzwang

Author: Ronan Bennett

Binding: Paperback

EAN: 9780747587316

Condition: Good

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Condition descriptions:
- As New: Hardly any signs of use, almost as new.
- Good: May show minor signs of use, such as some discoloration or a name on the endpapers, but generally no underlining or notes in the text.
- Fair: Book in fair condition. May show signs of use, such as discoloration, reading creases in spine, underlinings, notes, light soiling at edges, dog-ears, or a crooked spine.
- New: Book is new.

Description:
Zugzwang: derived from the German, Zug (move) + Zwang (compulsion, obligation). In chess it is used to describe a position in which a player is reduced to a state of utter helplessness. He is obliged to move, but every move only makes his position even worse. St Petersburg, 1914: imposing and shabby, monumental and squalid, and - under its surface of frosty glamor - seeing with plots and secret allegiances. On a blustery April day OV Gulko, a respected newspaper editor, is murdered in front of a shocked crowd. Five days later Dr Otto Spethmann, famous psychoanalyst, receives a visit from the police. There has been another murder in the city - and somehow he is implicated. He is mystified - and deeply worried, as much for his young, spirited daughter as for himself. He is preoccupied, too, by two new patients: Anna Petrovna, the society beauty plagued with nightmares with whom he is steadily and inappropriately falling in love, and troubled genius Rozental, the brilliant but mentally fragile chess master, due to play the most important competition of his life - the spectacular St Petersburg chess tournament - but on the verge of a complete breakdown. With the city rife with speculation and alarm, Spethmann broods over his own chessboard, its pieces frozen mid-battle, and contemplates the many forces - political, historical, sexual - that are holding him in their grasp