A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I usually fly through books, reading them in two days, but this book was different. Not only because of the nature of the writing but also because of the nature of my life when I started reading it. However, I stuck with this book, reading it little pieces at a time, and by the end I was very sad to be finished. It was a wonderful look at history through a very odd narrator.  I thoroughly enjoyed every moment I got to spend in Amor Towles’s Moscow.  Included below is the publisher’s description found on Amazon.

He can’t leave his hotel. You won’t want to.

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

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.