On a cruiseship bound for Buenos Aires, a wealthy passenger challenges the world chess champion to a match. He accepts with a sneer. He will beat anyone, he says. But only if the stakes are high.

Soon, the chess board is surrounded. At first, the challenger crumbles before the mind of the master. But then, a soft-spoken voice from the crowd begins to whisper nervous suggestions.

Perfect moves, brilliant predictions. The speaker has not played a game for more than twenty years, he says.

He is wholly unknown.

But somehow, he is also entirely formidable ...

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881, and gained fame first as a poet and translator, and then as a biographer, short-story writer and novelist. Zweig's first works were poetry and poetic drama, Jeremia (1917), wich expressed his passionate antiwar feelings.

With the rise of Nazism. he moved from Salzburg to London to research a book on Mary, Queen of Schots. He also visited Sigmund Freud, whom he had met already in the 1920s. In 1938 he became a British citizen and in 1940, after successful lecture tour in South America, he and his second wife Charlotte E. Altmann settled in Brazil.

Disillusioned and issolated, Zweig commited suicide with his wife, in Petrópolis near Rio de Janeiro on 23 February 1942.

Zweig's best-knownworks of fiction include Beware of Pity (1938) and Chess: A Novella (1944), as well as many historical biographies of subjects as diverse as Marie Antoinette, Erasmus, Mary Queen of Scots, Magellan and Balzac

The Times Litery Supplement:
"Zweig belongs with the masters of the novella"