A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

eBook, 462 pages

English language

Published June 27, 2019 by Independently Published.

ISBN:: 978-1-0885-3624-7

(42 reviews)

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.

51 editions

kerry reviewed A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Review of 'A Gentleman in Moscow' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I really should get credit for reading two separate books. One storyline involved the creation of a whiz-bang virtual reality "Cavern" by a well-funded lab in the Pacific Northwest. The other story focused on the kidnapping of an American in Lebanon.

I found the speechifying by the VR programmers to be unrealistic and rather dull.

The kidnapping saga generally held my interest but towards the end, I found myself skipping sections.

The two storylines do eventually come together, barely, in a science fictiony way that was an unconvincing jolt from the previous 400 realistic pages.