"He was used to fine things, and days with plenty of empty hours, and people bringing things to him. "He's a man of manners, he's a man of culture," Towles explains.
Your purchase helps support NPR programming. And a luxury hotel seemed like a "perfect spot" for an individual to be trapped as Moscow changed all around him.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Gentleman in Moscow Author Amor Towles "Russia has a history of house arrest over hundreds of years," he says. It's Towles' second novel - his first, Rules of Civility, hit the bestseller list in 2011, and he quit his day job to write full time.įor his new book, Towles says he knew from the outset that his main character had to be confined to a hotel against his will - and it had to be Russia keeping him there. That was the beginning of A Gentleman in Moscow, the story of a Russian aristocrat who is sentenced by the Bolsheviks during the revolution to a lifetime of house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel. Towles realized they were people who actually lived there and thought to himself, "Oh that's kind of an interesting notion for a book." One night, he was in Geneva at a hotel where he'd stayed many times before - and he noticed some familiar faces in the lobby. His first novel was called Rules of Civility.ĭuring the two decades he spent working for an investment firm, Amor Towles visited a lot of luxury hotels.
He prefers instead to play in between what is real and what is imagined. Amor Towles likes to write about the past, but says he is not driven by historical research.
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