THE GAMESHOUSE

A twisty tale of intrigue and games played for the highest possible
stakes.

The Gameshouse is always the same, though it is not always in the
same city; always home to a strange crowd of gamblers, some of whom don’t seem
to belong in this time and place. If you play well, you may be invited to join
the higher league. There, your pieces are people, and you must wager part of
yourself to join the game: “Your skill with language, perhaps. Your love of
colour….Years of your life.” We begin in Venice, 1610, where a woman named
Thene will be invited to play a game of Kings. We will travel many miles and
centuries from this beginning but must always remember that anyone we meet
might later become a player—or a piece to be played. North (84K, 2018,
etc.) creates a dark, atmospheric world in 17th-century Venice, then moves to a
high-stakes, suspenseful game of hide-and-seek all over Thailand in 1938, and
finally a world-spanning game of chess played for control of the Gameshouse
itself. The first two parts are stronger than the third, because the stakes
feel more immediate and less theoretical, but the whole adds up to something
quite rich.

An unusual, intriguing novel that’s both a paranoid fantasy
about a world where anyone can be bought and a broody tale about what really
matters when anything can be gambled away.