It presents a fictionalised account of a famous 1910 World Chess Championship match between Austrian grandmaster Carl Schlechter and the reigning German champion Emanuel Lasker.

The eponymous Carl Haffner, closely based on Schlechter, is a withdrawn character with an eccentric preference for drawing games instead of winning.

The narrative switches between the ten games of the 1910 World Championship and Haffner's psychological development in childhood and adolescence, showing how he used chess to overcome poverty.

The Guardian called it "strikingly good" and said that it was "one of chess's finest novels, sitting comfortably alongside Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense and Paolo Maurensig's The Lüneburg Variation".

[4] The Times Literary Supplement said: "Glavinic's novel achieves its considerable emotional impact slowly and subtly ... [he] writes about a game as if it were a poem or a painting".