BOOKET 2017

On the chessboard, Diego Padilla was a champion; in life, he was a victim. When chess sweetened his destiny with the entourage of praise and the blessing of love, the ravages of the Civil War and the misery of the postwar period pushed him into exile in France. Although in occupied Paris he managed to checkmate fate and save his life, he was not spared the final defeat. Horror was followed by despair when he discovered that they had stolen the one thing that still anchored him to the world—something more important than his own life.

Told in the first person, The Chess Player is a harrowing chronicle of the epiphany of love in times of desolation and the moral misery that ruined the dreams of a good man: a stoic loser who, for love, forgave betrayal and postponed vengeance. Perhaps the eternal struggle of white versus black became his melancholic refuge against the memory of a champion crushed by ultimate sadness. Chess was his life, but his life was more than just chess.

Written with the prodigious simplicity of the finest prose, this captivating novel allows the reader to witness the faces of baseness and cruelty, but also those of compassion and friendship, revealing the dual substance of the human condition—capable of weaving the sublime and its shadowy reverse. If in Apología de Venus Julio Castedo impressed with the depth of his vision, in The Chess Player he emerges as a master in the art of storytelling that strikes a blow to the conscience. One is never the same after finishing one of his novels.

The novel was adapted into a film by producer Gerardo Herrero, with a screenplay by the author himself, and won the Oniros Award (Best Feature Film) and the WorldFest Houston Award (Best Feature Screenplay: Historical Period Piece).