William Friend

Let Him in

Black Mamba

'Great fun... the suspense slips its slow coils around you' Daily Mail Daddy, there's a man in our room... This is the chilling announcement Alfie hears one night, when he wakes in his quiet, suburban house to find his twin daughters at the foot of his bed. It's been nine months since Pippa - their mother - suddenly died and they've been unsettled ever since, so Alfie assumes they've probably had a nightmare. Still, he goes to check to reassure the girls. As expected he finds no man, but in the following days the girls begin to refer to someone called Black Mamba. What seemingly begins as an imaginary friend quickly develops into something darker, more obsessive, potentially violent. Alfie finds himself struggling to cope, and so he turns to Julia - Pippa's twin and a psychotherapist - for help. But as Black Mamba's coils tighten around the girls, Alfie and Julia must contend with their own unspoken sense of loss, their unacknowledged attraction to one another, and the true character of the presence poisoning the twins' minds... A darkling tale of tragedy, hauntings and sexual desire, Black Mamba is a novel of a father's love for his struggling daughters, and a widower's growing love for a woman after his wife's death. With smart, gothicky touches and a large and generous challenge to our assumptions of what and who constitutes a modern family, it explores both the limits we'll go to for our children and the sunken taboos of grief - of how erotics can still exist, and can even be life giving, after suffering loss.

The 3 golden pillars of winning chess are undoubtedly TACTICAL sharpness, STRATEGICAL insight, and CALCULATION accuracy. Visualising future positions accurately is fundamental to playing winning chess. STEP by STEP methodology is combined with playing through 94 marvelous games starting with Morphy-> Capablanca-> Fischer-> Kasparov-> working up towards modern day grandmaster games. (from 1 move ahead[two 1/2 moves] to 10 moves ahead [twenty 1/2 moves] ). Thus the book is written for beginners as well as players right up to grandmaster level.(Of course it is not expected for a beginner to think 10 moves ahead. From beginner-grandmaster: concerning chess calculation training exclusively). Highly recommended . In this extraordinary book, the author also recognises the importance of ethics BEYOND the chess board {chapter 8}. Optional animal metaphor's are used for only 5 tactical terms, namely for pin, fork, skewer, double attack and discovered attack. (These terms however are not used anywhere in the 320 pages of calculation training).

William Friend

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