Amor Towles: if you like Dickens and Tolstoy, try this Egyptian writer
You don't hear of many investment bankers who give it all up to become novelists. Few advances can match a banker's bonus, for a start. But Amor Towles is not your average novelist. As a child, for instance, he exchanged letters with the managing editor of The New York Times, Harrison Salisbury, after he'd found a message in a bottle that Towles had thrown into the sea.
Born in Boston in 1964, he has degrees from Yale and Stanford (his English MA thesis was even published in The Paris Review). On graduating, he spent 21 years working in finance before quitting to write. Each of his novels, from Rules of Civility in 2011 to A Gentleman in Moscow in 2016 (the television adaptation starred
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