Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon in the Netflix series, The Queen's Gambit. Here Beth is seen looking pensive at a chess board, in the midst of a room of onlookers.

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Reading lists

Books to read if you loved The Queen’s Gambit

Helen DeWitt

Her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful… What grounds all DeWitt’s brilliance and game-playing is the way that she dramatizes a certain kind of hyperintelligent rationalism and probes its irregular distribution of blindness and insight…a wonderfully funny book, but comedy dances near the abyss; the apprehension of humor’s frailty links DeWitt to the tragicomic tradition of Cervantes, Sterne, and Nabokov

Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read

A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form

A bold, brilliant book…original both in content and form… DeWitt’s zeal cannot fail to enchant

An exhilaratingly literate and playful first novel by a fresh, electrifying talent. DeWitt goes to the top of the class...her adventurousness spins out on an epic scale

A brilliant debut novel...keeps things moving at an exhilarating clip... DeWitt is formidably intelligent but engagingly witty

The Last Samurai is an original work of brilliance about, in part, the limits of brilliance. And in literature as in life, DeWitt understands that what we like most of all is a good yarn

You walk into a book due to an Akira Kurosawa link and your fondness for the great film-maker. You walk out, staggered by the book's originality and bravery... It should be read by everyone

I adored this crazy, fabulous, lovable book… This really does deserve to be a modern classic

A brilliant and sad book… The funniest book I’ve read in years.

Helen DeWitt is a real find – I loved this book

It is exciting for the future of the novel that a writer can do all the basic things readers need – from Peter Pan to the Odyssey, from Bleak House to The Crying of Lot 49 – and do something new with the form of the tale itself

A delightful and original novel – expansive and intelligent writing

DeWitt pushes against the limitations of the novel as a form; reading her, one wants to push against the limitations of one’s own brain

An original, daring novel, The Last Samurai could well become a classic – accessible and as unremittingly entertaining to the casual reader as it is rewarding to those who would delve further

A tremendous novel. DeWitt is one of the most interesting writers working in the English language today

The Last Samurai is a book everyone should be talking about

De Witt has intelligence, wit and unusual stylistic bravery

DeWitt pushes enjoyably but firmly against (and sometimes beyond) the unknown capabilities of the reader

‘Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read’ MARK HADDON 
'Original...witty...playful…a wonderfully funny book' JAMES WOOD 
'A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form' A. S. BYATT 
 
Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father. Raised singlehandedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo’s been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn’t enough to satisfy the boy’s boundless curiosity. Is he a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He’s grown up watching Seven Samurai on a hypnotising loop – his mother’s strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him: his real father’s name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai – the father he never knew.

The Last Samurai

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Helen DeWitt

Praise for The Last Samurai

Her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful… What grounds all DeWitt’s brilliance and game-playing is th ...

Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read

A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form

Her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful… What grounds all DeWitt’s brilliance and game-playing is th ...

Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read

A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form

Her style is brilliantly heartless, and cork-dry; original herself, she is a witty examiner of human and cultural eccentricity. She is, above all, playful… What grounds all DeWitt’s brilliance and game-playing is th ...

Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read

A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form

Articles featuring Helen DeWitt

Books to read if you loved The Queen’s Gambit

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