Plenty of bargains

White to play and win

Today saw my biannual pilgrimage to the Canberra Lifeline Bookfair, a trip that involved more walking than normal. For once Miles Patterson and myself seemed to be the first to the chess section, so we had the pick of the collection.
I'm pleased to say that there were plenty of good chess books on offer, and while there were a number I already owned, I still grabbed about half a dozen. One of my more curious finds was a signed copy of "A Guide to Attacking Chess" by IM Gary Lane. However, it wasn't actually signed by Gary, but instead contained the signatures of GM Darryl Johansen and GM Ian Rogers.
One other book a picked up was "Secrets of the Russian Chess Masters". Early in it is a study from 1933 by Mark Liburkin, as shown in the diagram. It is White to play and win. Obviously the first issue is to deal with the threat  of 1 ... c1=Q# or 1 ... Be5, with the threat of discovered mate. Once you have done that, then it becomes a battle between White and the Black bishop. There are a number of subtle touches all the way through, although sadly, there may be a tougher line at the end that the composer may have originally missed. If you find it too hard to solve, feeding it into any strong engine should give you enough of a solution to see what the composer was trying to achieve.