A posh hotel becomes a prison in the blink of an eye.Īlexander has no choice but to make the best of the harsh verdict, even when he's evicted from his luxury apartment and assigned a poky room high in the attic. Even so, the Count is warned that if he so much as pokes his nose out of the Grand Metropol Hotel in Moscow, where he currently lives, he'll be shot. They would have executed him outright, but he escapes with his life because a poem attributed to him expresses sympathy to the populace.

In 1922, 32-year-old Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is arrested by the Bolshevik regime for the crime of being born an aristocrat.

If that's not an ideal story to ponder in time for general global lockdown, I don't know what is. It's about a man consigned to house arrest for the remainder of his natural life, who immediately sets about tweaking his attitude to grin and bear the loss of freedom. I was late on board to read his excellent novel, and surprised to see the publication date as far back as 2016. One person whose horror about the sudden visitation of Covid 19 on the world may have been mixed with a smidgen of timeliness is Amor Towles. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.īrimming with humour, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavour to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose. 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. 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. A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov.

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