Fischer-Kasparov Novel now out on Amazon

I'm hoping that fellow chess enthusiasts will enjoy the premise of my new novel, a fast-paced read, just published on Amazon, KNIGHT TO KING 4: THE FISCHER - KASPAROV MATCH, where chess titans from different eras compete. 

Thank you, in advance, for your interest and for passing this along! -Ken

I looked on Amazon and read the six page excerpt. The first page about "tidal lock", when time seems to stand still for everyone, was mildly intriguing. The narrator explains that he has experienced two instances of it in his own life but give us no hint as to what these were.  I am guessing that one of the two was watching the fictional Fischer Kasparov match but in the rest of the excerpt he never really says that that is the case.

All I saw after that was his reminiscences about growing up during the sixties, learning to play chess by playing games against himself and his fantasy of playing well enough in his first real game in a simul against a grandmaster to impress the grandmaster.  

It was pretty well done but it didn't quite set the hook for me.  I was not convinced to buy it.

I don't know who sets the selections shown on Amazon but if you have any control you might consider showing a page or two which refer to what I hope is the actual subject of the book.  I couldn't tell if you were ever going to get around to narrating a fictional battle between Fischer and Kasparov or if this story was really mostly about the narrator's fictional chess life.

From a chess history point of view, I don't know how many people would have thought that Kasparov was the "champion in waiting" in 1983, since he hadn't won the Candidates tournament to qualify for the World Championship match against Karpov unil early 1984 and Kasparov was nearly defeated in the first match against Karpov later that year. (The match that was supposed to go until one player had six wins but ended without result after it went on for six months with Karpov leading 5-3 and 40 draws.) 

Had your fantasy match taken place in early 1985, after the first K-K match had been been broken off when Kasparov had won the last two games and had clearly turned the tide,  that might have made more sense.

If you are viewing the "Print Book" tab of "Look inside", you can usually see more pages if you do a "Search Inside This Book". Just choose a word that's likely to occur a lot - such as "pawn" for chess books. With this trick, I was able to see 15 pages from this book.

It looks intriguing.

Fburton, thanks for the comments.  Notmtwain makes two valid points.  First, I used literary license to alter the timeline.  The premise of Knight to King 4 is that Fischer gets the urge to compete while Kasparov is looking for a tough challenge to prepare him for the first Karpov match.  Three heavy duty matches in a matter of months seemed fanciful, so I adjusted the timeline to move the Candidates' tournament to late 1983.

Second, if the excerpt does not grab you, I understand that everyone's tastes are different.  Fortunately as seen in the sales numbers noted below, readers are so far buying into the book.  My goal in writing this was twofold.   Re-capture the magic surrounding Fischer-Spassky.  Not too many people are around who witnessed that.  Moreover, last time I checked there were not a lot of human interest/general interest novels centered around chess.  Having always been intrigued by the presence in our lifetime of two of the all-time greats, I hoped to stimulate discussion and interest in the game.

I am pretty self-effacing, so when I say Amazon's sales rank has consistently put Knight to King 4 in the top 25 of alternate history books over the past week, it is in the spirit of gratitude to the readers, most of whom I am assuming are from the chess community.