Amor Towles

"The book is like a salve. I think the world feels disordered right now. The count's refinement and genteel nature are exactly what we're longing for." --Ann Patchett "How delightful that in an era as crude as ours this finely composed novel stretches out with old-World elegance." --The Washington Post He can't leave his hotel. You won't want to. From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility--a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel. In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and 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 entry 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. Soon to be a major television series starring five-time Academy Award® nominee Kenneth Branagh. "And the intrigue! . . . [A Gentleman in Moscow] is laced with sparkling threads (they will tie up) and tokens (they will matter): special keys, secret compartments, gold coins, vials of coveted liquid, old-fashioned pistols, duels and scars, hidden assignations (discreet and smoky), stolen passports, a ruby necklace, mysterious letters on elegant hotel stationery . . . a luscious stage set, backdrop for a downright Casablanca-like drama." --The San Francisco Chronicle

A Gentleman in Moscow

Nour

Meg Konieczny

Hannah Tierney

manchester moths of the industrial revolution

Beatrix

The pace of evolution was not something to be frightened by. For while nature doesn't have a stake in whether the wings of a peppered moth are black or white, it genuinely hopes that the peppered moth will persist.

Surely, the span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in all human interaction. What young lovers have not found themselves at this juncture in a silence so sudden, so seemingly insurnmountable that it threatens to cast doubt upon their chemistry as a couple? What husband and wife have not found themselves suddenly unnerved by the fear that they might not ever have something urgent, impassioned, or surprising to say to each other again?

Famous foursomes: the four seasons, elements, north south east and west…

But the Count and Sofia? They looked forward to it all day long — because it was the moment allotted for 

A game of their own invention, Zut's rules were simple. Player One proposes a category encompassing a specialized subset of phenomena- such as stringed instruments, or famous islands, or winged creatures other than birds. The two players then go back and forth until one of them fails to come up with a fitting example in a suitable interval of time (say, two and a half minutes). Victory goes to the first player who wins two out of three rounds. And why was the game called Zut? Because according to the Count, 

was the only appropriate exclamation in the face of defeat.

A Gentleman in Moscow quotes

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