Interregnum: Inside the Gruelling and Glamorous Battle to Become the Next King of Chess

Every elite chess player dreams of becoming world champion, of wearing the wreath and going down in history. Yet for many of today’s top grandmasters, that dream long seemed out of reach: Norwegian juggernaut Magnus Carlsen was just too good. So when Carlsen announced he wouldn’t defend his world title for a fifth time, the rest of the best finally saw a chance to sit on the throne.

Interregnum follows these brilliant and often eccentric minds around the world as they vie to become world chess champion. It’s a story of millennial greats whose time is running out. Of teenaged prodigies who refuse to wait their turn. Of triumph and heartbreak, aspiration and anxiety. Of an ancient sport experiencing a remarkable resurgence and of the extremely online enfants terribles changing the game.

Part sports chronicle, part paean, part character study, Interregnum offers something for both the chess-obsessed and the chess-curious as well as anyone who enjoys a riveting tale of struggle in sport or triumph of the intellect.

AuthorJordan Himelfarb

PublisherHouse of Anansi

On Sports

What are sports, really? What do we love about them? And what, in our digital age, have they become?

On Sports reads like a conversation between friends at the ballpark in those golden days before the kiss cam and college co-eds with T-shirt cannons spoiled the fun; a book that feels like the sun on your forehead and the breeze in your hair, beer and laughter on your lips; a book that celebrates communion and friendship and the beauty of these games—whether it be baseball or football or soccer or tennis or cricket—that we’ve designed to distract ourselves from the end of the world. It’s about what 7Up tastes like when drunk from the Grey Cup, how much work it takes for talent to shine, and the near impossibility of language to properly capture athletic excellence. It’s about the beauty of good sports copy, the ephemerality of even the biggest sports story, and how sport remains perpetually powered by the eleven-year-old in all of us. It’s a book about rediscovering the spirit of sport, before online gambling and the manufactured spectacle of today’s professional sports suffocates the last of it; and it’s about where that spirit today is best found.

AuthorDavid Macfarlane

PublisherBiblioasis

When the Game Changes

An engaging and deeply moving memoir from renowned Sportsnet anchor Evanka Osmak about finding a women’s hockey community just as she was losing her beloved mother to ALS.

When fan-favourite Sportsnet TV anchor Evanka Osmak was forty-one years old, she became a hockey player for the first time.

She had her dream job, a solid group of female friends, and a beautiful family; still, she realized she needed something outside of work that was just for her, particularly in the wake of a pandemic that caused all our worlds to shrink. That’s when she found Sister Sports, a local hockey league just for women. Evanka was used to reporting on hockey, so she knew the game inside and out—from the broadcast studio. But she’d never played before. And she wouldn’t realize until later how much this league would come to mean to her.

At the same time as she was falling in love with the game as a player, not just as a sports anchor, she received some devastating news: her beloved mother, Jeannie—her family’s rock—had been diagnosed with ALS.

As Evanka navigated her mother’s treatment and progressing illness, she found a sense of hope and community within her hockey team of adult women that helped her deal with the unthinkable.

When the Game Changes is a deeply affecting memoir that shows Jeannie’s care and influence throughout Evanka’s life, from her childhood through her lively early career, to finding herself in the co-anchor’s seat at Sportsnet. It’s the profound story of a daughter’s extraordinary love for her mom, and how a team of like-minded women provided solace at one of life’s most challenging times.

This is the story of how sports, family, and women’s community can get us through our darkest hours.

AuthorEvanka Osmak with Kristina Rutherford

PublisherSimon & Schuster Canada

Simon & Schuster Canada

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