A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

What a beautiful book this was. I really didn't know what I was getting into. I first heard of Amor Towles when his subsequent book, The Lincoln Highway, came out and it seemed to get a lot of media attention – I suppose on the strength of this book, though I missed any attention it got when it was published. I'm not sure I would have thought again about Amor Towles except that sometime later a friend of mine posted an instagram story saying that she was reading The Lincoln Highway and that it was "so beautiful." Even then, I probably wouldn't have sought his books out, but a month or two ago, a neighbor around the corner put out a box of free books in front of their house and A Gentleman in Moscow was among them, so I grabbed it and brought it home, where it sat on my coffee table for a few weeks before I decided to pick it up on Memorial Day. I still really knew nothing about it.

From the title I think I was expecting it might be a spy novel, and I was mildly surprised to find it began just after the Russian Revolution. The opening, which takes the form of the official documentation recording the government's decision on what to do about a former aristocrat, who by his social class should be eliminated, but who was the author, several years earlier, of a poem revered by the revolutionaries. His association with the poem spares his life, and Alexander Rostov is placed under permanent house arrest in the hotel where he lives in the center of Moscow. The book follows his life in the hotel and the view it gives him of the changing world outside for the next 30-plus years. Right up to the end, I never knew where the book's events were leading. This is a book with many small twists and turns, rather than one big plot twist. The way that Towles unspools the story is masterful.