Master of the Game

If you love a rags-to-riches story, set in exotic lands, then this is a must-read book. It goes into detail about how European prospectors mine diamonds and build a business while facing a lot of challenges. Since a portion of my novel takes place in South Africa, it helped me with information on how life was during that period at the turn of the twentieth century. It is also a family saga spanning four generations, but most importantly focuses on the daughter of the man who goes to South Africa to mine diamonds, and the various challenges she faces from… show more.

I grew up reading Sidney Sheldon, and if you don’t know him, stop reading anything else and google him. Master of the Game is a masterclass in characterization. Revenge, of course, is the underlying theme, but the story is epic and has more twists and turns than a German pretzel. I read this book thirty years ago, and I can still feel the tension Jamie McGregor felt crawling through the diamonds on a South African beach and can relate to his struggle to seek revenge.

I would recommend this book, because the protagonist in my novel is similar to the woman in the novel who inherits a business from her father, and the trouble she has to endure while running it from family and those who wish to destroy her. It was also made into a miniseries in the 1980s. It features four generations of the family for a period of almost a hundred years. The author Sidney Sheldon is one of my favorite authors and his books helped inspire me to become a writer, and to write family sagas with history as a background.