Talk with Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles was born and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University. His first novel ‘Rules of Civility’ was a breakout hit of 2011. His stay in suite 217 of the Hotel Metropol in Moscow – the very place the first Soviet constitution was drafted – inspired the setting of ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’. It is a gem of a book, that blends a glittering cast of brilliant characters with a wholly compelling storyline written with tenderness and wry humor. It has delighted readers since its publication and was featured as a Waterstones Book of the Month in 2017.

Meet Count Rostov. In 1922 he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. He is sentenced to house arrest in The Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an in 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 to a much larger world of emotional discovery.

The event will be held in English.