Book Club Collection: 'A Gentleman in Moscow' by Amor Towles

Amor Towles has curated a gallery of images related to A Gentleman in Moscow that you can view on his website: A Gentleman in Moscow: Gallery - Amor Towles

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and 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 entry 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.
(Summary provided by the publisher.)

Born and raised in the Boston area, Amor Towles graduated from Yale and received an MA in English from Stanford. Having worked as an investment professional for over twenty years, he now devotes himself full time to writing in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children. His novels Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway, and his collection of shorter fiction called Table for Two have collectively sold more than six million copies and been translated into more than thirty languages. Both Bill Gates and President Barack Obama included A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway on their annual book recommendation lists.

Rules of Civility (2011) was a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of the year. The book’s French translation received the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald.

A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years 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. In 2024, Paramount+ released a mini series based on the novel which stars Ewan McGregor.

The Lincoln Highway (2021) debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The book is being adapted as a feature film by Warner Brothers with Chris Storer, the creator of “The Bear”, writing and directing.

Table for Two (2024), a collection of six short stories and the novella “Eve in Hollywood”, was a New York Times bestseller.

Towles’s short stories have appeared in the Paris Review (#112), Granta (#148), British Vogue, and Audible Originals. Access to some of these stories as well as a few short essays can be found in the Other Writing section of this website.

Towles wrote the introduction to Scribner’s 75th anniversary edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and the Penguin Classics edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. “As for Clothing”, Towles’s essay on Walden, appears in the anthology Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau.
(Biography provided by the author)