Book Title: Games: A Love Story
Author: Anna Maria Volkova
Publisher: William Morrow
Publishing Date: June 2026
Every once in a while, a book arrives in your life that demands to consume you whole, that invites a descent into a glorious crashout and forces you to pause every other page because of how viscerally you’re reacting to the words before you. Games: A Love Story by Anna Maria Volkova is patently (and deservedly) going to be this book for several readers.
It is hard to say if we will find a book as intense, heartbreaking, honest, and provocative as Games, or main characters as messy yet formidable as Lili Marwan and Aleksandr Petrov. We find 23-year-old Econ grad student at Columbia indulge in verbal sparring with her 45-year-old Wall Street banker compeer, with both of them carrying the weight of deep emotional wounds they love to pretend aren’t dictating their lives. They enter an undernegotiated power exchange dynamic, a comical irony for two people who seem to be talking about everything under the sun with remarkable eloquence: art, politics, history, philosophy, economics, and what have you.
Even as Games plays into the many beaten tropes: there’s the problematic age-gap, ideological polarities, miscommunication, grief, it does not succumb to either. The book is self-aware to a fault; Volkova knew what she was doing and she delivered it well. The friction is soothing, in their conversation, in their sex, in the scabs of Lili’s abandonment wounds, and in the scars of Aleksandr’s silent grief. In a way, they are both delusional enough to believe that they can outrun their grief, so their love is also a reckoning of their delusions, an acceleration of the expiration date on their dolorous coping mechanisms.
Games is Ali Hazelwood’s scrumptious tension meeting Sally Rooney’s fallible characters, and even as the novel seems intent on boxing its characters into familiar templates — Lili as that commitment-phobe who bolts at the first whiff of the promise of longevity, the young girl using astrology as a crutch in conversations that lead to reflections she doesn’t want, and an indefatigable idealism about her hope to save the world OR Aleksandr’s relentless defence of the capitalistic machinery, his jaded views on communism, or his supposedly superficial pursuit of wealth — it’s all part of a delicious deception.
Do we have to earn everything? Can life not be a gift, sometimes?
You think you know these characters well because of how confidently they wear their skins and convictions, but of course you don’t, because they are pathologically and ruthlessly guarded, walls built so high that you’d have your work cut out for you as a reader to climb them. This means that you’d have to care enough about these characters, deem them worth enough, to climb these walls, against grime and gravity. It also means that you’ll have to forgive them for the spikes and thorns you encounter on your way up and down these walls. What I can assure you, though, they will be worth the climb.
For a story as refreshing and sharp as Games, I am equally offended to reduce it to a love story as I am compelled to yell from the rooftops about the whirlwind romance of these two soulmates who have, inconveniently for both of them, found each other in an opportunity to keep each other, too.
She knows nothing good can come of someone meeting a need so deeply.
But Lili does stupid things sometimes.
People who turn into self-saboteurs because they can’t trust happiness or can’t trust themselves around happiness because it’s so unfamiliar to them don’t always find a soft spot in the fictional world, but I hope Lili Marwan endears to you enough so you can extend her grace. Everything that Lili dares to want and get…everything she pushes too far…is laced with so much sadness it stabs at the reader almost as much as it stabs at her friends, who she also keeps at a delusional distance; the orphan child in her unwilling to entertain the idea of permanence or promises.
I am expecting the book to also herald a divisive reader base, but the ride alone would be worth it, and that might make it a great pick for your book clubs, if you’re not easily intimidated by erotic complexities.
“It’s a familiar feeling, this sense of hovering on the margins, an outsider looking in. Not just in relation to the wealth lacing the room—but with most people in general.“
Like Lili and Aleksandr themselves, this book is hungry. It settles for nothing less than your soul. Better, then, to lay your sanity willingly at its altar and let it drag you through every uneasy, ecstatic, and devastating emotion it has to offer.
WRB rates Games A Love Story by Anna Maria Volkova a perfect 5 stars.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher William Morrow for providing an advance review copy (ARC). All opinions expressed are my own.