A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles ‘87

The Yale Club of Vermont is delighted to present its second Book Club offering, the novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Yale author Amor Towles. A great summer read, the Yale Book Club will meet to discuss the book over Zoom in September.

All are welcome to join.

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922, the count 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 a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.