This book was my introduction to the great Amor Towles, and since then I’ve read every book he’s written. A vast novel with an incredible premise (an upper-class man of note is sentenced to the rest of his life in a grand hotel) I couldn’t imagine how so much story could happen in a single hotel.
But it did, and A Gentleman in Moscow remains one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Towles does amazing things with Count Alexander Rostov’s character, making him both debonair and amusingly sarcastic. He has many delightful—and some not-so-delightful—characters to play off of, including the hotel staff and one precocious little girl who wants to discuss “the business of being a princess.”
I fell in love at that point, with her, with him, and this community inside the hotel. Because of the consequential period in history, there was a lot of suspense in the book. There were heart-palpitating scenes that made me react with tears, and others that made me laugh out loud.
Mostly though, I was entertained beyond my imagination.