For over twenty years, Amor Towles was an investment professional until he retired in 2013 in order to write full time. His first novel, Rules of Civility, was ranked by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best works of fiction in 2011 and its French translation received the 2012 Prix Fitzgerald. He serves on the boards of the Library of America, the Yale Art Gallery, and the Wallace Foundation. A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking) immerses us in an 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.
