Books like A Gentleman in Moscow
What should you read after Amor Towles’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Amor Towles
- 2016
- 480 pages
- Historical fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after A Gentleman in Moscow
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchRules of Civility
Amor Towles
Towles in 1938 Manhattan with the same tailoring on every sentence: a typing-pool girl talking her way into a set that was never going to keep her.
- Elegant, witty prose
- A comfort read with depth
- Found family
- No single confined setting
Best for a life inside one buildingThe Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
A concierge hiding her erudition in a Paris apartment building, and a twelve-year-old on the fifth floor who notices — an entire world inside one address.
- A life inside one building
- Elegant, witty prose
- Found family
- Digressive and quite arch
Best for civility as resistanceThe Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
The other great novel of service, formality and history sliding past a man who refuses to look at it directly. Funnier than you remember, and far sadder.
- Civility as resistance
- History happening offstage
- Elegant, witty prose
- No found family, no warmth
Best for a comfort read with depthA Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
A curmudgeon with rules, a neighbourhood that keeps interrupting him, and a found family assembled entirely against his will. Comfort reading with real grief inside.
- A comfort read with depth
- Found family
- Elegant, witty prose
- Contemporary Sweden, no history
Great matchThe Lincoln Highway
Amor Towles
Towles again, in 1954 Nebraska and New York: four boys, ten days, and the same generosity toward people who behave rather better than they need to.
- Elegant, witty prose
- Found family
- A comfort read with depth
- A road novel, not a hotel
Worth a look — with a warningThe Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Moscow outside the Metropol's doors, written by a man living in it: the devil visits Stalin's city, and Bulgakov turns the terror into farce.
- History happening offstage
- Elegant, witty prose
- A comfort read with depth
- Surreal — there is a talking cat
What should you read after A Gentleman in Moscow?
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Rules of Civility by Amor Towles — towles in 1938 Manhattan with the same tailoring on every sentence: a typing-pool girl talking her way into a set that was never going to keep her.
If what stayed with you was a life inside one building, read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery instead: a concierge hiding her erudition in a Paris apartment building, and a twelve-year-old on the fifth floor who notices — an entire world inside one address. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is the other strong option — the other great novel of service, formality and history sliding past a man who refuses to look at it directly. Funnier than you remember, and far sadder.
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