Escapes

Florence Satine and Buenaventura Escobar live and die by the luck of the draw from the Scrabble tile bag in Tunnard's delightful debut. --Publishers Weekly
In an alternate 90s where Scrabble (not poker) is a global sensation broadcast live on ESPN, former world champs Florence Satine and Buenaventura Escobar meet deep in Argentina's Tigre Delta for one final game. The words they play spell out how they ended up here, and why they are probably going to die.
By 1996, Scrabble is big business. The once innocent game has gone pro, becoming the third-most televised "sport" in the world, and earning its major players fame, fortune and corporate sponsorships. The league, however, is tightly controlled by a Scrabble mafia (e.g., The Scrafia) and is suffering from a scourge of corruption, match-fixing, and most disturbingly, the mysterious disappearances of problematic players. When Florence and Buenaventura defy the sinister Scrafia, they recall the unlikely obsession that dominated their lives: a tumultuous romance...with a game.
This is the story of a Scrabble reality that never was, but should have been. A bilingual, lexicographical romp across the world, Escapes raises the stakes with each new letter placed upon the rack.

Author: Daniel Tunnard
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Published: 10/06/2020
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781951213114

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/14/2020

About the Author
Daniel Tunnard is a competitive Scrabble player, who finished thirtieth in the Scrabble World Cup in Spanish, in Paraguay, in October 2017. He finished thirteenth at the subsequent World Cup in Mexico in 2018. He will be competing in the 2020 World Cup, in Montevideo, and intends to win it outright, purely for book marketing purposes. Tunnard is also the author of two nonfiction books Colectivaizeishon, el inglés que tomó todos los colectivos de Buenos Aires (Penguin Random House Argentina, 2013), which is about taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, and Trenspotting en los ferrocarriles argentines (Marea 20,16), a follow-up in which he rides all the trains in Argentina. ESCAPEs is his first novel.