A Gentleman in Moscow was my book club’s selection of the month. She took a look at The New York Times and decided on this book after seeing the good reviews it received. Amor Towles has written an easy-to-read, cosy winter book and it is delightful.
A Gentleman in Moscow begins with Count Alexander Rostov being sentenced to house arrest for a lifetime at the Hotel Metropol. But instead of that excellent room he always stayed in, he is confined to a tiny attic room on the sixth floor. However, this room was once used by the servants, with only a small window. How do you think the Count will leave behind the comfortable life he has been accustomed to all his life and get used to the life he will spend in this room and hotel?
Through Count Alexander Rostov and Hotel Metropol, Amor Towles managed to tell a period of Russia, human relations and many other things. You will find many things from Russia in the novel, admire many of them and witness an extraordinary father-daughter relationship. I think this could be a delightful book for long, cold nights. Enjoy!
A Gentleman in Moscow
More than half a million readers have fallen in love with the New York Times bestseller A Gentleman in Moscow
‘Everything a novel should be: charming, witty, poetic and generous.A Gentleman in Moscow is an absolute delight’ Mail on Sunday
‘A work of great charm, intelligence and insight’ Sunday Times
‘Winning . . . gorgeous . . . satisfying . . . Towles is a craftsman’ New York Times Book Review
‘A comic masterpiece’ Daily Express
‘If we do a better book thanA Gentleman in Moscow on the book club this year we will be very very lucky’ Matt Williams, Radio 2 Book Club
‘Abundant in humour, history and humanity’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A Gentleman in Moscow: Wistful, whimsical and wry’ Sunday Express
A Gentleman in Moscow: On 21 June 1922 Count Alexander Rostov – recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt – is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol.
But instead of being taken to his usual suite, he is led to an attic room with a window the size of a chessboard. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely.
While Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval, the Count, stripped of the trappings that defined his life, is forced to question what makes us who we are. And with the assistance of a glamorous actress, a cantankerous chef and a very serious child, Rostov unexpectedly discovers a new understanding of both pleasure and purpose.
Amor Towles
Born and raised in the Boston area, Amor Towles graduated from Yale College and received an MA in English from Stanford University. Having worked as an investment professional for over twenty years, Mr. Towles now devotes himself full time to writing in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children.
Mr. Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility, which was published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2011. The book has been translated into over 20 languages, its French translation receiving the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald.
Mr. Towles’s second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which was published in 2016, wason the New York Times bestseller list for over a year in hardcover and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. The book has been translated into over thirty-five languages including Russian. In the summer of 2017, the novel was optioned by EOne and the British director Tom Harper to be made into a 16 hour miniseries starring Kenneth Branagh.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
