After reading Towles' masterful Rules of Civility, I'm all in for anything else he publishes. However after a few chapters of A Gentleman in Moscow, I was unsure of whether or not I was going to enjoy this book; in other words, not much was happening. I should have known better than to question Towles' methods. 
 After Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to a life imprisonment inside the hotel Metropol by a Bolshevik tribunal, we spend the next 30 plus years with him - never leaving the hotel. Where could this story possibly go? I was blown away by the resulting 462 pages that lead to an ending worthy of a Hollywood classic. 
 Count Rostov is perhaps one of the most charming characters I've encountered in literature. His old ties to the aristocracy lend him a wealth of knowledge on people, places and things, but his personal honor and generosity endear him to those he encounters. Determined to master his own circumstances, the Count creates a space and routine for himself that eventually net him his own hotel family and a job as head waiter of the hotel's best restaurant, the Boyarsky. But it is perhaps what he doesn't plan for that has the biggest impact on his life. 
 A chance encounter with famed actress Anna Urbanova, an interrupted dinner by young and precocious Nina Kulikova, living in the hotel while her father conducted business elsewhere and years later, a desperate request from Nina that will connect the Count with Nina's daughter Sophia, are all told in exquisite detail with the Count occasionally harkening back to his youth and even breaking the fourth wall at times to explain the various state of politics in Russia and their effects on the population, to us readers. 
 This is a book to be savored. Any twists and turns are built on a strong foundation that is constructed before our very eyes, but only revealed in the last couple of chapters. And what a reveal it is! Thought provoking, tear jerking and full of beauty, I can't recommend A Gentleman in Moscow enough.