Bloomsbury, London, 2016, hardcover, 408 pp, 780 grams, condition: very fine, NEW.

Stephen Moss has worked for the Guardian as an editor and writer since 1989. He was the paper's literary editor, has written widely on sport and culture, and in 2006 edited Cricket's Age of Revolution, a history of the game since the Kerry Packer coup, for Wisden.

"Truth, beauty and annihilation: my quest for chess mastery
When I hit a slump in middle age, I set out on a quest to see if playing better chess would make me a better person. I was unprepared for the pain of defeat.

I was a middle-aged man who had done OK in life, but there was something missing. I hadn’t created anything substantial; hadn’t mastered a discipline. I craved substance, and saw in chess a possible way of laying down a marker. I would become an expert, demonstrate that I wasn’t just a dilettante. After a lifetime of chess mediocrity, I set out to achieve excellence, for the first time in my life to truly master a world, to become good – not just good at chess, but at living. To get really expert I would have to be focused, disciplined, ruthless even – all the things I had found it difficult to sustain in an often rackety life." - Stephen Moss, Guardian  

"It is precisely because it is all too difficult for Moss to realise his ambition to become an expert-standard chess player that his book is so engrossing. There are countless volumes that recount the narrators’ onward and upwards march to pre-eminence. This is a book about learning to accept one’s own mediocrity. Since mediocrity is the space the vast majority of us occupy, The Rookie is actually a life lesson much more relevant than all of those self-help books of fatuous and unrealistic optimism" - Dominic Lawson, Daily Mail