A girl, a master key, a Red Army officer, a bit of saffron, and a Russian blue cat... will transform the microcosm of Count Rostov.

At the moment when Alexander Ilyich Rostov was passing through the guarded gates of the Kremlin and stepping into Red Square, the weather was clear and cool. The officials of the current regime decided that the appropriate punishment for an aristocrat who dared to write poetry was his confinement in the Metropol Hotel.

It was June 1922 in Moscow when the captain led the count and his entourage to the entrance of the grand Art Nouveau hotel and from there to a poorly lit staircase that ended in an attic. Among the few pieces of furniture he was allowed to keep,
the count chose a porcelain set, the portrait of his deceased sister, and all his books. In this room, the former aristocrat could listen to his thoughts for the next thirty years, while outside some of the most eventful decades of
Russian and world history unfolded, the rise of Stalin and the Great Purge, the collapse of the front in the summer of '41, the beginning of the Cold War...

Amor Towles, though a foreigner, manages to revive the great Russian novel and create a feast of images, scents, and sensations in the reader's mind, mixing the fiery verses of Mayakovsky, the narrativity of Tolstoy, the introspection of Dostoevsky, the satire of Bulgakov, and the suspense of Solzhenitsyn.