Book club: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (512 pages)

*Important: In the book club meetings, we can take attendees only (we cannot take the waiting list) and attendees that have read the book*

Waterstones says: Both an exquisite comic masterpiece and a profound meditation on the actions and emotions that give life purpose, A Gentleman in Moscow views the events unfolding in the decades after the Russian Revolution through the eyes of a Russian aristocrat under house arrest in the attic of the opulent Hotel Metropol.

'On the third floor, the Count walked down the red-carpeted hallway towards his suite – an interconnected bedroom, bath, dining room, and grand salon with eight-foot windows overlooking the Lindens of theatre square. And there the rudeness of the day awaited. For before the flung-open doors of his room stood a captain of the guards with Pasha and Petya, the hotel’s bellhops…'

On 21 June, 1922, Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol.
Instead of being taken to his usual suite, he is led to an attic room with a window the size of a chessboard. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely.

While Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval, the Count, stripped of the trappings that defined his life, is forced to question what makes us who we are. And with the assistance of a glamorous actress, a cantankerous chef and a very serious child, Rostov unexpectedly discovers a new understanding of both pleasure and purpose.