Opening books seem to be coming out of the woodwork, with hundreds of new titles appearing each year. Most of these are pretty bad, and most cover lines that have been written about many times before.

The Trompovsky, though, is an opening that has had very little written about it. A few articles here and there (Joel Benjamin's coverage of the Tromp in the pages of Chesslife is excellent), the occasional survey, some annotated games; this is all us would-be Trompovsky players have been offered.

During a recent trip to Germany I found a 205 page hardback on this line by Wolfgang Gerstner (in German, of course. By the way, who in the hell is Wolfgang Gerstner?). Delighted, I bought it immediately and squirreled it away in my bedside bookcase, casting furtive glances at its rather dry, impersonal pages from time to time. It didn't offer anything new, but it systematized the material in a way that nobody had done before.

Now Grandmaster Julian Hodgson has come out with his own work on the Tromp, and I couldn't think of anyone who is better qualified to do so. Acknowledged as the world's leading expert on this opening, Hodgy gives us 157 pages on the position arriving after 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bg5 Ne4 (the soon to be released volume two covers all other lines).

Writing in his usual talkative and entertaining fashion (rare for opening books, which are usually rather uninteresting), Julian gives us all the theory mixed with whole games, new ideas, emotional ups and downs, and historical insight. This fine mix creates a very readable, extremely useful, and much needed book (a good editor would have helped the prose, but I like the book so much that I just don't have the heart to nit-pick).

A must own for players who employ 2.Bg5 and for those who have to face it as Black.