The 3 best books of Amor Towles

If Love is indeed the real name of Towles, no doubt the parents of this amazing writer were on the crest of the wave when they chose to call him that. But finally, peculiar names always come in handy when someone wants to mean themselves in something like writing. Once known the writer Love Towles, you hardly forget him anymore.

We remember it even more, jokes aside, because Towles is already one of those best sellers from the singular fact, from the differentiation and the dislocation that as soon as it positions it in the historical fiction as if it approaches a space between the intimate and the existential thanks to the captivating force of its characters and their inner worlds.

The question is the balance, the taste or the ability to summarize the scenery and the inner life of the characters. There are those who have a hard time getting it and end up winning, for example, towards a historical novel of simple disclosure. Or who is not properly documented in the same case and ends up writing a plot that does not fit in any way in his supposed space-time line.

Amor Towles manages to transmit with its fluidity, its rhythm and a precious detail (almost always rescuing the most decadent of each moment), that humanism that aims high but also reaches the essential empathy of the reader who seeks to live in another skin.

Top recommended novels of Amor Towles

A gentleman in Moscow

Towles was also a victim of that indoctrinating and eighties vision of a world looming over the perversity of a cold war commanded from icy Moscow. Surely this story that has fascinated readers around the world is the revenge of ideologies transmitted by land, sea and air, from the news to the imaginary inserted through fiction.

Written with the utmost elegance and a warm sense of humor, this exceptional novel tells us about our inexhaustible ability to cope with the misfortunes of existence.

Sentenced to death by the Bolsheviks in 1922, Count Aleksandr Ilyich Rostov eludes his tragic end by an unusual twist of fate. Thanks to a subversive poem written ten years earlier, the revolutionary committee commutes the maximum penalty to an unprecedented house arrest: the aristocrat will have to spend the rest of his days at the Metropol Hotel, a microcosm of Russian society and a conspicuous exponent of luxury and decadence. that the new regime has set out to eradicate.

This curious story is the basis for the second Amor Towles novel, which after receiving countless praise for Courtesy rules, his debut feature, is consolidated as one of the most interesting American writers of the moment.

Erudite, refined and chivalrous, Rostov is a regular customer of the legendary Metropol, located a short distance from the Kremlin and the Bolshoi. With no known profession despite being in his thirties, he has devoted himself with real passion to the pleasures of reading and good food.

Now, in this new and forced position, he will build a semblance of normality through emotional ties with some of the hotel's diverse characters, which will allow him to discover the juicy secrets that his rooms keep. Thus, over more than three decades, the count will see his life pass confined behind the immense windows of the Metropol while one of the most turbulent periods in the country unfolds abroad.

the lincoln highway

Since the matter of initiatory trips is about, nothing better than considering a trip along the first highway to cross the United States from coast to coast. Because Route 66, the mother road of the United States, came later and today it is related to tourist expeditions, enlightened people in search of experiences and other ilk of strange travelers. The Lincoln Highway is something else, less popular but more authentic since the leading role is taken by 66.

So we can expect authenticity, a more complete search for the journey as a vital foundation. And so it is in this plot. A colossal story about the initiatory journey of four young people through the heart of the United States during the decade of the fifties.

Told from multiple points of view and populated by a diverse cast of magnetic characters, from bums living on the rails to Upper East Side aristocrats, the lincoln highway It is an overwhelming novel of encounters and disagreements, a haphazard transition from youth to adulthood.

the lincoln highway

Courtesy rules

The gates of heaven suddenly open for writers who have come out of nowhere, from that kind of lumpen inhabited by frustrated writers. With this story, Amor Towles thundered at the gates of heaven until they broke down. It was that unusual ability to relive everything, to reactivate mechanisms and springs of moments in our history suspended in time waiting for the touch of magic to recover life in all its splendor and all its contrasts.

A vibrant tribute to XNUMXs New York. With dialogue sharp as daggers and a fizzy beat, Courtesy rules tells the learning of an ambitious young woman who struggles to survive in the city of a thousand faces, a jungle where the best opportunities coexist with infinite temptations and dangers.

On New Years Eve 1937, Katey Kontent, a typist at a Wall Street law firm, and Eve Ross, her pensioner, come out ready to make the most of the freedom New York promises. They head to The Hotspot, a third-row bar where they take jazz seriously enough that no one bothers two good-looking girls, and where gin is cheap enough to drink a dry martini every hour.

When the three dollars they were carrying are used up, Theodore Tinker Gray, a young puppy of the New England aristocracy, appears on the scene, sporting a ravishing smile and a coat that Katey and Eve could not afford with their one-year wages. Together they will end up celebrating the arrival of the new year in Times Square, on a night that will mark the beginning of a friendship that will transform their lives.

This chance encounter will give Katey access to select circles of New York society, in which, thanks to her sharpness, her nerves of steel and her intellect, she will be able to open many doors for her. However, immersed in a resplendent universe, a frivolous and dissolute world inhabited by characters of dubious origin, Katey will have to discover the rules of the game to adapt to the challenges of the big city.

Courtesy rules
5/5 - (17 votes)

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