From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel
With his breakout debut novel, Rules of Civility, Amor Towles established himself as a master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction, bringing late 1930s Manhattan to life with splendid atmosphere and a flawless command of style. Readers and critics were enchanted; as NPR commented, “Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.”
A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.
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, was on 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.
Other works of fiction by Mr. Towles include:
• Eve in Hollywood, a volume of six interlinked short stories which follow Evelyn Ross — the character from Rules of Civility — to Hollywood in 1938. Like Eve, the volume is slim and enigmatic. You may obtain a signed edition by contacting Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in New York City at (212) 772-3400, or by ordering from them online here.
• “You Have Arrived at Your Destination”, a futuristic story published in 2019 as part of the Forward collection by Amazon and edited by best selling author Blake Crouch. It is available for the Kindle and as and audio book through Audible. You can find it here.
• “The Line”, a short story published in 2019 in the British literary journal Granta (No. 148). You can find it through the Indie Bound, the independent bookstore’s online network here, or from Amazon here.
• “The Temptations of Pleasure”, a short story cycle was published in 1989 in Paris Review 112.
Mr. Towles also wrote the introduction to the 75th anniversary edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night published in 2019 by Scribner’s.
