Amor Towles

Amor Towles spent more than twenty years as an investment professional before publishing his first novel at fifty, and the late start shows in the work: his books are unhurried, formally controlled, and unembarrassed about wanting to entertain. Rules of Civility arrived in 2011, followed by A Gentleman in Moscow, the story of a count sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel, and The Lincoln Highway. He reads as deliberately as he writes, and his recommendations tend to come with an argument attached rather than a rating.