![]() There followed the most delightful few hours. Sometimes you just have to give in to a book, even one of which you (slightly) disapprove. I remember thinking that even its author’s name – who is Amor Towles, if not a character in a Truman Capote short story? – came across as part of what we might call “the concept”. Five years ago, I opened that book with a certain amount of reluctance: the work of a former banker with dandy-ish clothes and (or so I read) a covetable Manhattan townhouse, it seemed, outwardly, to be little more than a quite brazen attempt to mash up Sex and the City and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s 1938 as the story opens, and Katey has just about had it with the narrow options facing a young woman in Depression-era Manhattan. You stress the second syllable: con- tent, as in satisfied. I’d clean forgotten about Towles, whose first novel, Rules of Civility, came out in 2011. In Amor Towles’s witty and slyly brutal debut novel, Rules of Civility, the protagonist is one Katey Kontent. Should he step outside the Metropol’s door, he will be shot, and so, inside it he remains, for the next 32 years. ![]() ![]() It isn’t out here until February, but given that it has already been published in the US, I think it’s probably OK for me to say that it tells the story of one Count Alexander Rostov, an elegant Russian aristocrat who in 1922 is sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal to house arrest in a luxury hotel. ![]() T he other day, my husband strolled into my office bearing major booty in the form of a proof of A Gentleman in Moscow, the new novel by Amor Towles. ![]()
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