It’s release day for BOLD MOVES, my second chance romance about a chess grand master adapting her memoir with the director whose heart she broke in high school. It can now be yours on Kindle (and in KU) and in paperback; the wonderful audiobook—read by Savannah Peachwood and Jeremy York—is available at Audible; and there are additional buy links at Books2Read.
I have to confess something: I am boring. No, really, it’s true. I eat the same thing for lunch almost every day. I love listening to narrative history podcasts. And I think solving the Piano Puzzler is fun.
See, I told you—boring.
But because of that, in real life and in fiction, I have always had a soft spot for people who paint their lives in screaming neon. Those capital-C characters who are loud and audacious and comfortable in the spotlight. Those folks who can crank their emotions up to 11. Jaime and Scarlett are those kinds of people.
This is a book about how the stories we tell become our identities. It’s about making impossible choices when you’re probably going to lose the game. It’s about fate and forgiveness…and the seductiveness of reusable canvas bags, sourdough bread, and chess. Chess above all things.
I had to stretch to write this book, but I believe deeply in Jaime and Scarlett’s great and epic love, and I hope you will too. If you really want to marinate in the world of the book, I made a playlist on Spotify and collected inspiration images on Pinterest.
If you do pick Bold Moves up, I’d appreciate it if you’d consider dropping a rating and a review, particularly at Amazon and Goodreads. I’m trying to convince my publisher to let me write more books for them, and the release week sales and the reader response make a real difference.
I want to shout out some of the folks who helped get Bold Moves into the world. This book would not exist with Genevieve Turner and Olivia Dade. They are the best writing friends I could ever ask for, and I’m so grateful for their support, good humor, and rock-solid advice.
My agent, Sarah Younger, is a force of nature, and I never would’ve sold Bold Moves, or indeed anything, without her.
Lauren Plude and the team at Montlake are incredible, and I’m so humbled that I’ve gotten to make four books with them. Kristi Yanta edited Bold Moves beautifully, going above and beyond to help me wrangle the manuscript into submission.
My husband and son played chess with me daily while I was drafting. While I never managed to beat either of them, they weren’t triumphalist about it, which I appreciated.
There’s an entire list of books and authors whose work informed Bold Moves in the acknowledgements, but I want to highlight the debt I owe to Jennifer Shahade, Irina Krush, and Judit Polgár. I hope that I’ve written thoughtfully about the sexism in international chess, but their legacies, books, interviews, and work is the real deal.
And I’m so grateful for YOU. For all the readers who’ve bought my books, or borrowed them in KU, or checked them out from the library, the ones who’ve listened to my audiobooks and dropped reviews on Goodreads and talked about my work on social media. The last 2.5 years trying to reboot my career have been a whirlwind, and I couldn’t have done it with my readers: so thank you.
Emma Barry 