Reading List

Authors Like Amor Towles

Four books in thirteen years, by a man who spent more than twenty years as an investment professional in New York and did not publish a novel until he was forty-six. Rules of Civility (2011) covers a single year, 1938, in Manhattan. A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) covers thirty-two years without once leaving a hotel. The Lincoln Highway (2021) covers ten days and counts its chapters backwards from ten to one. Table for Two (2024) is six New York stories and a Los Angeles novella that hands a minor character from the first book her own two hundred pages. Together they have sold more than eight million copies in over forty languages. The method is consistent enough to name: a closed setting, an ensemble that organises itself into a household, narration passed from character to character, and a plot in which courtesy, competence and a well-laid table do the work that violence does in other people's novels. Whether that is a virtue or an evasion is the one real argument about him, and there is a section on it further down. The ten writers below are chosen for how they build a book, not for how they make you feel.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Historical fiction · New York · 8 million copies sold · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Amor Towles, the closest match is Ann Patchett: Bel Canto runs the same experiment as A Gentleman in Moscow, in which one building becomes the whole world, strangers turn into a household, and music and food carry the plot. For the voice — a formal man whose entire self is a code of conduct, inside a great house the century is dismantling — read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. For the ensemble comedy and the period Americana of The Lincoln Highway, read James McBride. And for the argument against him, Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time asks the same question about surviving Stalin and gives the opposite answer.

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10 authors like Amor Towles

01
One building, one world · Closest match

Ann Patchett

American · Bel Canto (2001), The Dutch House (2019), Whistler (2026)

Bel Canto takes the 1996 seizure of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima as its starting point and turns it into a novel about what happens when hostages and captors are shut in together long enough to become a society: they cook, they learn each other's languages, and an opera singer's daily practice organises the day. It won the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002. Her later novels are domestic rather than confined — The Dutch House, a Pulitzer finalist in 2020, is a brother and sister sitting in a parked car outside the house they were thrown out of. She co-owns Parnassus Books in Nashville, which she opened in 2011 when the city lost its bookshops. Her tenth novel, Whistler, was published by Harper in June 2026 and is set in New York.

The closest structural match anywhere on this page. Bel Canto and A Gentleman in Moscow run the same experiment: seal a mixed group of people inside one grand building, remove the outside world, and watch a household assemble itself out of strangers with nothing in common but the rooms. In both, the plot is carried by cooking, music, languages and small courtesies rather than by the political violence that put everyone there. The difference is the ending, and it is a large one: Patchett collects the bill and Towles does not. The two writers are on record together — Towles interviewed her about Whistler on stage in New York in June 2026.

— Lisanne

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02
The voice, run in reverse

Kazuo Ishiguro

British · The Remains of the Day (1989), Never Let Me Go (2005)

The Remains of the Day is narrated by Stevens, a butler on a motoring holiday in 1956, reviewing a career spent in perfect service to an employer who turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser. The formality of the voice is the whole method: everything that matters is what Stevens cannot bring himself to say. It won the Booker Prize in 1989 and became a Merchant Ivory film in 1993. Never Let Me Go applies the same restrained first person to children raised as organ donors. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England at five; he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

The same figure as Count Rostov, examined from the other side. Both books give you a man whose identity is entirely a code of manners, living inside a great building while the century abolishes the class that produced him, and both keep him almost wholly indoors. Towles treats the code as a survival technique that works and lets the Count keep his dignity; Ishiguro treats it as a wall the man built around his own life and shows what it cost him. Read them in either order and each one exposes the machinery of the other.

— Lisanne
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03
Older than the genre

Edith Wharton

American · The House of Mirth (1905), The Age of Innocence (1920)

Wharton wrote the fiction of old New York from inside it: drawing rooms in which a misjudged invitation ends a life, and women whose choices are bounded by money they are not allowed to earn. The House of Mirth follows Lily Bart's twenty-month slide from the top of that society to a boarding house; The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 1921. She organised and funded relief work in France during the First World War and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour for it in 1916. Her work and her letters also contain antisemitic caricature — the financier Simon Rosedale in The House of Mirth is the standard example and the subject of a substantial critical literature — alongside nativist views common in her class and generation, and readers now meet her with that on the record.

The direct ancestor of Rules of Civility, and the reason that book works. Katey Kontent is a typist without money moving through Manhattan rooms whose rules are unwritten and ruthlessly enforced, which is Lily Bart's exact predicament thirty-three years earlier; the difference is that Katey has a job and a decade that will let her keep it. Towles took his title from George Washington's list of rules for civil behaviour, but Wharton wrote the definitive fiction about what those rules cost and what happens to a woman who breaks one. Start with The House of Mirth and the whole architecture of the 1938 novel becomes visible.

— Lisanne
04
The other big literary bestseller

Anthony Doerr

American · All the Light We Cannot See (2014), Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021)

Doerr builds novels out of very short chapters that cut between timelines and viewpoints until they converge. All the Light We Cannot See alternates a blind French girl in besieged Saint-Malo with a German boy conscripted for his talent with radios, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015; Cloud Cuckoo Land braids five stories across five centuries around a lost Greek manuscript. His sentences are deliberately lyrical, and the recurring critical objection is that the beauty softens the history it is describing. The 2023 Netflix adaptation of All the Light was widely panned, which is worth knowing before you use the series as a sample.

The writer Towles readers are handed most often, and the comparison holds at the level of construction rather than subject. Both build long novels out of short numbered chapters that pass the narration around a small cast, both use a countdown or a converging structure to create momentum without a thriller plot, and both write on the assumption that a sentence should be worth reading aloud. Both also keep atrocity mostly offstage and locate their interest in decency under pressure, which is the same choice that draws the same criticism.

— Lisanne
05
The ensemble comedy

James McBride

American · The Good Lord Bird (2013), Deacon King Kong (2020), The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023)

McBride writes crowded comic novels rooted in a single American place and year: a Brooklyn housing project in 1969 after an old church deacon shoots a drug dealer in the plaza, or a Black and Jewish neighbourhood in 1930s Pottstown, Pennsylvania, organised around a grocery store and a secret. The Good Lord Bird, narrated by a boy travelling with John Brown in a dress, won the National Book Award for fiction in 2013 and became a Showtime series with Ethan Hawke in 2020. He began with The Color of Water (1995), a memoir of his white Jewish mother, is a working saxophonist and composer, received the National Humanities Medal in 2016 and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2024.

The nearest living relative of The Lincoln Highway. Both write mid-century America as a place with jokes in it: a large ensemble in a tightly bounded setting, narration handed from one character to the next chapter by chapter, an act of violence at the centre that the comic register never disowns, and a plot that keeps being diverted by somebody's scheme. The difference is who is in the crowd. McBride's Americans are poor, Black, immigrant and urban where Towles's are white and rural, and reading the two together gives you the same decade from two ends of it.

— Lisanne
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06
The road novel, harder

Chris Whitaker

British · We Begin at the End (2020), All the Colours of the Dark (2024)

Whitaker is a Londoner and former City trader who writes small-town America across decades. We Begin at the End gives you a thirteen-year-old who calls herself an outlaw, raising her brother in a California coastal town while the man convicted of her aunt's death comes home; it won the CWA Gold Dagger, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the Ned Kelly Award in 2021. All the Colours of the Dark moves to 1970s Missouri and runs thirty years on a disappearance. Both have been optioned for television — the first by Disney's 20th Television in 2021, the second by Universal Content Productions in 2024 with Sarah Gubbins as showrunner.

For the reader who wants The Lincoln Highway's engine without its safety net. The parts are the same: children carrying adult burdens, a journey across the American map that keeps being knocked off course, a cast of grown-ups who are either useless or dangerous, and a structure that looks like a crime novel and works like a coming-of-age story. Whitaker also writes America from outside it, as an Englishman assembling the place from its own fiction, which is a different kind of artifice from Towles's but a related one. Where Towles arranges a rescue, Whitaker lets the damage stand.

— Lisanne
07
The same century, warmer and colder at once

Anthony Marra

American · A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015)

Marra writes the Russian and Soviet twentieth century as tragedy told by a comedian. His debut follows five days in wartime Chechnya around a doctor hiding a child in a ruined hospital; The Tsar of Love and Techno is a cycle of linked stories running from a Leningrad censor in 1937 — whose job is to paint disgraced people out of photographs, and who quietly paints his executed brother into them — to a nickel-mining town in Siberia and a Chechen valley, with a single small painting passing between them. Mercury Pictures Presents (2022) moves an Italian exile into wartime Los Angeles and the American film industry.

The most precise match for the Soviet material specifically, and a useful correction to it. Marra shares the conviction that comedy is the right register for state terror and that objects, jokes and small acts of loyalty are what survive a regime — but his violence is on the page rather than beyond the hotel doors, and his characters are the ones the Count never meets. The Tsar of Love and Techno is also a linked collection in which minor figures move to the centre of the next story, which makes it the natural next book after Table for Two.

— Lisanne
08
The argument against him

Julian Barnes

British · Flaubert's Parrot (1984), The Sense of an Ending (2011), The Noise of Time (2016)

The Noise of Time is a short novel about Dmitri Shostakovich built from three scenes twelve years apart: waiting by the lift with a packed suitcase in 1936 after Pravda denounced his opera, being sent to New York in 1948 to read out a speech he did not write, and joining the Party in 1960. Its subject is not heroism but the arithmetic of compromise — what a man signs, what he says aloud, and what that leaves of him. Barnes won the Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending and has written across fiction, essays and memoir since 1980; Flaubert's Parrot is the book that made his name.

The deliberate counterweight on this page. Barnes published in January 2016 and Towles in September of the same year, both asking how a cultivated man survives Stalin, and they answer in opposite directions. The Count keeps his manners, his friendships and his integrity intact inside the Metropol; Shostakovich keeps his life by signing whatever is put in front of him and spends the rest of the book despising himself for it. Reading them back to back is the fastest way to see what A Gentleman in Moscow chooses to leave out, and library read-alike lists pair them for a reason.

— Lisanne
09
History from inside the household

Maggie O'Farrell

Northern Irish · Hamnet (2020), The Marriage Portrait (2022), Land (2026)

Hamnet is about the death of Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son in 1596, told almost entirely from his mother's side of the house; Shakespeare is never named in it. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020 and was adapted for the stage by the RSC. The Marriage Portrait does the same for Lucrezia de' Medici, married at fifteen and dead at sixteen. Her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am (2017) is built from seventeen near-death experiences. Her tenth book, Land, was published by Tinder Press on 2 June 2026: a multi-generational novel that opens on an Irish peninsula in the 1860s, after the Famine, with a father and son working as labourers for the Ordnance Survey.

What Towles does with a hotel, O'Farrell does with a household: research worn so lightly that the period arrives as weather, food, illness and furniture rather than as exposition, and a plot that turns on a domestic decision instead of a historical one. Both write the past without irony and without costume-drama distance. The difference is the vantage point — Towles narrates the century from a lobby where the powerful pass through, O'Farrell from a room the powerful never enter, and hers is by far the harder-edged of the two.

— Lisanne
10
For the story collection

Elizabeth Strout

American · Olive Kitteridge (2008), My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), The Things We Never Say (2026)

Olive Kitteridge is thirteen stories set in one Maine town, in which a retired schoolteacher is the centre of some and a passing figure in others; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 and became an HBO miniseries with Frances McDormand in 2014. Strout has kept extending the same method across books rather than within them: Lucy Barton, Olive and the Burgess brothers keep reappearing in each other's novels, most recently in Tell Me Everything (2024). Her prose is deliberately plain and her subject is what people cannot say to their families. The Things We Never Say, published by Random House on 5 May 2026, is the first of her novels to leave Maine.

The right recommendation for a reader who arrived through Table for Two. Strout is the modern master of the trick Towles uses when Eve walks out of Rules of Civility and into a two-hundred-page novella of her own: a minor character in one story becomes the centre of the next, and the recurring cast does the work a plot would otherwise have to do. She simply runs it across an entire bibliography instead of one book. The register is the opposite of his — plain, unshowy, no set pieces — which makes the pairing useful rather than repetitive.

— Lisanne
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Where to start if you loved Amor Towles

If you want the closest match, read Ann Patchett.

Bel Canto. One building, a group of strangers who become a household, and music instead of a plot.

If you want the Count's voice, read Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Remains of the Day. The same man and the same code, with the bill itemised.

If you want The Lincoln Highway again, read James McBride.

Deacon King Kong. A crowded American comedy with a shooting at the centre of it.

If you want the ancestor of Rules of Civility, read Edith Wharton.

The House of Mirth. Manhattan rooms, unwritten rules, and a woman with no money.

If you want the counter-argument, read Julian Barnes.

The Noise of Time. Surviving Stalin, told as compromise rather than as gallantry.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Amor Towles

Who should I read if I love Amor Towles?

Ann Patchett is the closest — Bel Canto is the same experiment as A Gentleman in Moscow, with one building standing in for the world and a household assembling itself out of strangers. Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day gives you the Count's voice and code from the other side. James McBride is the nearest match for the ensemble comedy of The Lincoln Highway, and Chris Whitaker for its road-trip machinery. Anthony Doerr is the closest in construction, Edith Wharton the ancestor of Rules of Civility, and Elizabeth Strout the writer to read after Table for Two. If you want the argument against him rather than more of him, read Julian Barnes.

What order should I read Amor Towles's books in?

They are not a series and can be read in any order, but publication order works best: Rules of Civility (2011), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), The Lincoln Highway (2021), Table for Two (2024). There is one real connection: Eve Ross, who walks out of Rules of Civility partway through, is the subject of Eve in Hollywood, the two-hundred-page novella that closes Table for Two. That novella first appeared as a standalone e-book in 2013. Read Rules of Civility before it or you will lose most of the point. Otherwise the books share nothing but a sensibility.

Which Amor Towles book should I start with?

A Gentleman in Moscow, which is the book that made him and the one people mean when they recommend him: a count sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Hotel Metropol in 1922 and still there thirty-two years later. It spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list. If a novel that never leaves one building sounds airless, start with The Lincoln Highway, which is a ten-day road trip in 1954 with chapters that count down from ten to one. If you want the shortest way in, Table for Two is six New York stories and you can read one in half an hour.

Is Amor Towles writing a new book?

Yes, but there is no title, publisher or date as of September 2026. He announced on X in 2022 that he had started a novel that opens in Cairo in 1940 and ends in New York in 1999, and he has described it in interviews since. In February 2025 he said publicly that no novel would appear that year and that it would likely be 2026 or 2027. Nothing has been scheduled. What has appeared in the meantime: he wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics centennial edition of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, published on 2 June 2026, and Viking is publishing a tenth-anniversary deluxe edition of A Gentleman in Moscow on 27 October 2026.

Is A Gentleman in Moscow a true story?

No. Count Alexander Rostov is invented, and so is his sentence. The setting is not: the Hotel Metropol opened in Moscow in 1905, stands opposite the Bolshoi, housed Bolshevik government offices after the revolution and is still a working hotel. Towles has said the idea came to him while checking into a grand hotel he had visited for years on business and recognising the same people in the lobby. The surrounding history — the 1922 show trials, the terror of the late thirties, the war, the death of Stalin in 1953 — is real, and the novel's choice is to keep almost all of it outside the front door.

Is A Gentleman in Moscow historically accurate, or too cosy about Stalin's Russia?

Both criticisms are worth taking seriously, and they are about emphasis rather than error. The dates, the hotel and the political events are broadly right. The objection, made about the novel and more loudly about the 2024 television version — Slant Magazine's review was headlined “A Cozy Little Rebellion”, and Variety argued the historical setting was underused — is that the terror stays offstage, that the Count's confinement is a gilded one measured against the Gulag, and that charm is doing work that horror should be doing. The defence is that the book is explicit about being a novel of manners, that it is interested in what an individual can preserve rather than in what the state destroyed, and that the deaths it does deliver land hard. If you want the same question answered the other way, read Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time or Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno.

Where can I watch the A Gentleman in Moscow series, and will there be a season 2?

The adaptation is an eight-part limited series created by Ben Vanstone, starring Ewan McGregor as Count Rostov and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Anna Urbanova, which ran from 29 March to 17 May 2024 on Showtime in the United States and Paramount+ internationally. There will be no second season: it was commissioned as a limited series and covers the whole novel, so there is no more book to adapt. McGregor was nominated for a Golden Globe and a Critics' Choice Award for the role. Reviews were good rather than rapturous — around 91 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and 74 on Metacritic.

Is The Lincoln Highway being made into a film?

It is being attempted. Christopher Storer, the creator of The Bear, signed in March 2024 to write and direct a feature adaptation for Warner Bros., with David Heyman producing and Tom Holland attached to star. In May 2026 it was reported that Warner Bros. had declined to green-light the film at a budget of thirty to forty million dollars, with the pending Paramount acquisition of the studio cited as the reason, and that Storer and Heyman were free to take the project elsewhere. Other studios are said to be interested. Nothing has been shot. Earlier attempts on his other books stalled in the same way: Lionsgate bought Rules of Civility in 2012 and hired the screenwriters of The Spectacular Now in 2013, and no film was ever made.

What did Amor Towles do before he became a writer?

He spent more than twenty years as an investment professional in New York, at Select Equity Group from 1991 to 2012, as an investment manager and director of research, and he wrote in the evenings and at weekends. He was born in the Boston area in 1964, took a degree in English at Yale and an MA in English at Stanford, and published his first novel at forty-six. He left the firm in 2012, after Rules of Civility became a bestseller, to write full time. He lives in Manhattan.

Are there books like A Gentleman in Moscow set in Russia?

Several, and they vary enormously in temperature. Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time (2016) covers the same decades through Shostakovich and reaches the opposite conclusion about what survival costs. Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015) runs from a 1937 censor to a Siberian mining town and keeps the comedy while putting the violence on the page. Beyond those two, library read-alike lists reliably point Towles readers to Robert Littell's The Stalin Epigram and Keith Gessen's A Terrible Country. If what you actually loved was the confinement rather than the country, the better next book is Bel Canto.

Sources

List last reviewed 5 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“Upstairs in my room, I began playing with the idea of a novel in which a man is stuck in a grand hotel.”

— Amor Towles, Q&A on A Gentleman in Moscow, amortowles.com.

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