I studied Russian history in high school and became fascinated by the Tsars, so when I heard about A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, I had to read it. I was not disappointed, the historical novel has a bit of everything – poetry, politics, espionage, friendship, romance and  parental duties.

If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.

In 1922 after the Russian Revolution, aristocratic count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is accused of writing a counter revolutionary poem by the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and sentenced to a life of confinement in Moscow’s Hotel Metrolpol. He is moved from his luxury suit at the hotel to a cramped room on the 6^th floor. 

Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve–if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.

Over the decades of his incarceration Count Rostov overcomes despair at his circumstances to make a full life for himself within the confines of the hotel, inspired by a young girl he meets who has a great curiosity and a skeleton key. He discovers the hotels hidden treasures and idiosyncrasies. Through the years at the hotel, Count Rostov becomes a waiter with a knack for seating guests in such a way as to avoid any disruptions to diners, falls in love and has a daughter.

If patience wasn’t so easily tested, then it would hardly be a virtue. . . 

A charming romp through Russian history, A Gentleman in Moscow has a fairytale quality about it, but is also a beautiful literary novel brimming with delightful colourful characters and a setting that adds colour to the suffering taking place outside its walls through decades of wars and revolutions.