"A Gentleman In Moscow"

June 21, 1922. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, born in St. Petersburg in 1889, a man of leisure living in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, is deemed a subversive by the Emergency Committee of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. 

He is sentenced to spend the rest of his days in the Metropol; "make no mistake," he is told, "should you ever set foot outside of the Metropol again, you will be shot."

What unfolds is the story of the Count's confinement over three decades in a novel so piquant and mesmerizing one doesn't want it to end. "A Gentleman In Moscow" ($17 in paperback from Penguin) is by Stanford-educated, Manhattan-based Amor Towles (amortowles.com). 

In the Metropol (an actual grand hotel near the Kremlin) the Count witnesses the development (and devolution) of Party ideals and finds he must take up residence not in his spacious suite but in an attic. And there is Nina.

"But for the virtuous who have lost their way, the Fates often provide a guide. On the island of Crete, Theseus had his Ariadne and her magical ball of thread to lead him safely from the lair of the Minotaur. Through those caverns where ghostly shadows dwell, Odysseus had his Tiresias just as Dante had his Virgil. And in the Metropol Hotel, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov had a nine-year-old girl by the name of Nina Kulikova."

Years later Nina returns to the Metropol, a married woman with a daughter, Sofia. She asks the Count to look after her as she leaves to try to find her husband, who has been arrested. Nina never returns, and the childless Count becomes an adoptive father.

The story is poignant, wry, and wise. The Count's life has ushered him into the "Confederacy of the Humbled," "a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed."

Does the Count escape? Suffice it to say the reader will be up at night turning pages to find out.