Graphs measure interactions between objects, from friendship links on Twitter, to transactions between Bitcoin users, and to the flow of energy in a food chain.

The text is primarily intended to support a one-semester course for graduate students or outstanding undergraduates who have already taken a class on graph theory. It could also be a useful entrance point for mathematicians who want an overview of pursuit-evasion games. The author provides many exercises, as well as several suggestions for more ambitious research projects. Overall, the book is reader friendly and engaging, with many helpful figures and illustrations. The author writes in the preface that the book aims to be ‘self-contained, understandable, and accessible to a broad mathematical audience,’ and it achieves that goal.

As a whole, it’s remarkable how Dr. Bonato has distilled a huge body of literature into an extensively referenced 250 page book that could have easily been at least twice that length. Researchers will surely find this a helpful reference text, with lots of important results and proofs conveniently organized in one place, but they are also likely to encounter something new and interesting, and probably an open problem or two to ponder. Meanwhile, those who are newer to exploring these topics will almost certainly find at least one motivating idea — a particular application or an entry point into the theory — that gets them hooked into reading more.