The #2 Bestselling Audiobook of 2017, A Gentleman in Moscow is the story of Count Alexander Rostov, who in 1922 is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal and sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. This transporting novel relates the counts endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.
“Through Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s ordinary encounters and activities within the bounds of the four walls of post-revolutionary Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, where he is under house arrest, Towles deftly guides readers across a century of Russian history, from the Bolshevik uprising to the dawn of the nuclear age under Krushchev. Grandiloquent language and drama reminiscent of Tolstoy gradually give way to action and tradecraft suggestive of le Carré in this lovely and entertaining tale of one man’s determination to maintain his dignity and passion for life, even after being stripped of his title, belongings, and freedom. Reading A Gentleman in Moscow is pure pleasure!”
—Becky Dayton, The Vermont Book Shop, Middlebury, VT
The top 10 audiobook bestseller list is based on sales through independent bookstore locations in 2017.