Beth Harmon becomes an orphan when her parents are killed in an automobile accident. At eight years old, she is placed in an orphanage in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, where the children are given a tranquilliser twice a day. Plain and shy, she learns to play chess from the janitor in the basement and discovers that she is a chess genius. She is adopted by Alma and Allston Wheatley and goes to a local school, but remains an outsider. Desperate to study chess and having no money, she steals a chess magazine from a newspaper store and then some money from Alma Wheatley and a girl at school, so that she can enter a tournament. She also steals some of the tranquillisers to which she is becoming addicted. At thirteen she wins the tournament, and by sixteen she is competing in the US Open Championship. Like Fast Eddie (in The Hustler), she hates to lose.
- ISBN10 0141190388
- ISBN13 9780141190389
- Publish Date 27 August 2009 (first published 1 October 1984)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 3 September 2015
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Imprint Penguin Classics
- Format Paperback
- Pages 272
- Language English