Win or Lose, You’ll Love These 10 Books About Games

Four girls at a second-rate boarding school compete to create the most outlandish lies possible that will still be believable to others. The only rule in “the lying game”? They must never lie to each other. As adults, the girls are brought back together when one of their lies seems ready to emerge with potentially devastating consequences.

I’m pretty sure no one should ever agree to a game involving Stephen King. In this case, a sex game between husband and wife goes horribly wrong, ending in deadly consequences and leaving the wife trapped in an isolated lakeside house.

The name of this book’s game is tennis. After an injury, tennis prodigy Charlie Silver hires Todd Feltner, a coach famous for grooming champions. Todd turns Charlie into a fierce competitor, on and off the court, but her new image and attitude come with a major price.

Two rival executive assistants, Lucy and Joshua, play a series of “games” to see who can irritate the other most. When both are up for the same promotion, their battle of wills reaches a boiling point, and while tensions flare, Lucy begins to wonder if maybe she doesn’t hate Joshua—and maybe, Joshua doesn’t hate her either.

In this classic bestseller, Kate Blackwell is a master of the game of business and life. She created an international conglomerate, and on her 90th birthday, she considers the future of her empire, surveying the family she’s crafted, manipulated, and almost destroyed, .

ENDER’S GAME involves mock battle games to prepare child soldiers to fight an invading alien race. When Ender Wiggin is drafted into the military school that is orbiting Earth, he is challenged psychologically and physically, all while the threat of an alien invasion looms closer.

The goal of this book’s game seems to be to keep all the dark secrets buried in one southern town. When widowed Houston prosecutor Penn Cage returns to his Mississippi hometown, he finds himself reopening the most highly charged murder case in the area’s history.

Josef Knecht is a twenty-third-century elite intellectual growing up in Castalia, a utopian province. Since childhood, he has been consumed with mastering the glass bead game, which requires a synthesis of mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy. If he achieves his goal, he will become a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game). Hermann Hesse won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature for this fascinating tale about the complexity of modern life.

A GAME OF THRONES is the ultimate game and an obvious addition to this list. For new and old fans of both the original books and the television show, this graphic novel series is another great way to experience the battle for the Iron Throne.

Actually, the title lies, because this book is very much about a game—an alternate-reality game, to be exact, which blurs online gaming with reality. Dagmar is a game designer, who at the beginning of the book is trapped in Jakarta during a revolution and must use all her resources, including millions of online gamers, to get home and solve the murder of one of her friends.