Hundreds of mid-Missourians had the chance to hear from the author of a novel that people across the community read this year.
Amor Towles, author of the Daniel Boone Regional Library's One Read selection "A Gentleman in Moscow" joined the library in a virtual presentation Tuesday evening.
Towles said it is an author's greatest fantasy to have their book be the center of conversation.
"I certainly know there's One Read programs across the country and for fiction writers or non-fiction writers, there's really no greater honor than to have a community choose your book as a part of a one read because it shows a local enthusiasm," Towles said.
The book follows the life of a man placed under house arrest for 30 years in a luxury hotel in Moscow. Towles said he got the idea for "A Gentleman in Moscow" while travelling for work.
"As I'm wandering through life, as someone who has loved writing fiction since I was a child, I'm constantly bumping into an idea and sort of grabbing hold of," he said.
Towles used to spend a week in a hotel each year.
"One year, I was arriving at my hotel in Geneva for the eighth year in a row and when I came into lobby, I recognized some of the people hanging out in the lobby," Towles said. "I mean, it was it was as if they had never left. And I thought to myself, you know, this is a nice hotel, can you imagine if you actually had to live in it?"
Upstairs in his room, Towles began sketching out an idea on hotel stationery. He had 10 pages of handwritten notes by the end of the weekend. He set the idea aside and eventually came back to it.
He spent years thinking visualizing the outline and then writing the story. The book has an unusual underlying structure. After the first day of the main character's story, the book skips ahead a day and then two days later and then five days later - each gap grows larger by weeks and months and years until it grows to a 16-year gap. At that point, the gap begin growing smaller.
"Now I had an idea when I was younger that wouldn't be interesting to write a story, like something structured like this and I kind of set that aside," he said. "And the minute I had the notion of I'm going to have a story about a guy trapped in hotel, I could say that within seconds, I knew that it was going to be set in Russia within seconds."
The main pieces of the story fell together instantly, and he fairly quickly realized the accordion structure fit the story.
"I kind of knew that the tale I was going to tell really fit this accordion shape because I knew that the reader and I would want to know what happened in those first couple of days in great detail," Towles said. "But you don't want to spend 30 years looking at every single day in a hotel. You want to start to move with greater speed as he's going through changes in life."
The virtual program allowed readers to get answers to their questions about the novel both big and small - a valuable opportunity for anyone who's ever read a book and wondered why.
For example, several participants wanted to know why Towles began each chapter with a word beginning with the letter "A."
"As a writer, when you hit that moment, you do have to kind of ask yourself, is this a terrible idea? Is this a great idea?" Towles said. "And in this case, you might have to go with your instinct, and my instinct was, we're going with it."
The book is set in Soviet Russia, but Towles wanted to give his work a sense of whimsy and help build the suspension of disbelief.
"What I try to remind myself, and I think what the book to some degree is talking about, is that during this era, you know, the Russian people continue to get throat associated with all these challenges, continue to throughout the Soviet era with all of its challenges, continue to fall in love," he said. "They continue to get married and have children, and they want the best for their children."
Though the novel's characters are invented, at least one figure from Towles's life made a cameo.
When Towles was 8, his family took a trip near Cape Cod. He stuck a note in a bottle and through it out into the ocean.
"I remember very clearly, we'd come home, we'd been away for a couple of weeks and the house was kind of empty and quiet," he said. "So there's this big stack of mail, and my mother is going through the stack and she says, there's a letter here for Amor, for 'Master Amor Towles.' And more than that, it's from the New York Times."
Towle's message in a bottle had been found by Harrison Salisbury, who was, at that time, the managing editor of the Times. Towles met Salisbury.
Decades later, when he was working on "A Gentleman in Moscow," he read first-hand accounts of journalists staying in Hotel Metropol Moscow. One of the accounts mentioned Salisbury, who it turns out, had written a book about his time in Moscow.
"There are a number of things that end up in the book which are borrowed from his reminiscences," Towles said.
Salisbury makes a brief appearance in the book.
"I took great satisfaction from writing that scene because it was my small way of paying back this great, genteel giant who had the willingness to write me as an 8-year-old boy," he said.