Manila Gambit

Paul Snell novice reporter gets assigned a weekly column on chess mostly because of his faux-filial attachment to the Hane Tribunes owner Waldo Turner. In return Snell promises to attend to and probably marry Waldos fragile unhinged niece Pamela Snow. The unlikely couple soon enough latch onto American chess prodigy Mikey Spendip and his mother Vera as they ascend the ladder of tournament chess. During the summer of 1980 at the Interzonal Finals in Manila Philippines Spendip is persuaded to aid an uprising against dictator Ferdinand Marcos by deliberately losing a crucial match. But that gesture slips into a gory comic fiasco. The novel is an ironic commentary on the nature of chess chance and love in revolutionary circumstances. Take Eric Ambler add a dollop of Carl Hiassen and a drop of Graham Greene bitters and you get Manila Gambit. John Zeugner keeps you laughing (almost) to the breathtaking end of this tale told by an hedonic journalist who follows the sun and a clutch of chess masters from Florida to the Philippines under the Marcos dictatorship. His travels are complicated by an addled girlfriend her dysfunctional family and a band of terrorists. --Chandler Thompson translator and journalist John Zeugners latest novel a fast-moving chess thriller (!) weirdly entangled in cold-war and guerrilla-war intrigue brings together a humanitarians love for the little gestures that count with an historians understanding of the vast geo-political structures that make us stumble and fall. The writing moreover mirrors the favored style of chess. Punctuated by bold gambits it advances a complex plot with rapid-fire dialogue that sparkles with verve and wit. A wonderful read! --Joseph P. Lawrence Professor of Philosophy College of the Holy Cross All authors of fiction are jealous of other authors of fiction so I suggest everyone get out their knives in anticipation of John Zeugners latest novel Manila Gambit. He certainly has stolen my dream by successfully creating a second life career as a novelist and his work just keeps getting better. In Manila Gambit he has moved from his previous work which was heavily based upon his real life experiences to a fiction lighter and yet better crafted than anything he has written before. Its sense of place people and time put it in the ranks of the best of light comedic fiction up there with Peter Maryle and Compton Mackenzie. --Bruce Stronach Dean Temple University Japan Campus John Zeugners collected stories Under Hiroshima (2014) about teaching in Japan won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Prize for fiction. He has published a novel Soldier for Christ a collection of three short novels Food for Jackals (2014) and another collection of stories Life-Arc Teaching Tales (2015). He briefly played for the Harvard chess team after the first three boards left the college for personal or academic reasons.