Table for Two by Amor Towles

If Amor Towles scribbled a few notes on the back of an envelope, I would want to read it. His writing is so well crafted that there are some passages that you can just enjoy for the choice of words. After I read A Gentleman in Moscow I was hooked and I happily recommend his books to all sorts of people because they are classically good and there is nothing in them to startle the elderly or a man of the cloth.

This is a book of short stories with a novella at the end, but each piece is written with the same care as a full length novel and it is easy to switch from one to the next without any feeling of disappointment. Sometimes with short stories I feel irritated when one story comes to and end and the next begins, because I don't feel ready to change direction, but with writing of this quality it didn't take me long to settle each time.

The novella is set in the late 1930s and artfully relates to the movies of the day. The key character here is Evelyn Ross who is a feisty young woman who outsmarts many of the men around her and brings about justice after a well known film star is threatened with blackmail. She's the kind of character that could easily feature in a longer book, and now I have read the inside of the dust-jacket, I find that she is already the star of Towles' debut novel 'Terms of Civility' that I have yet to read. Needless to say, that book will be high on my list of books to seek out in the library and I hope it won't be too long before I find it.

Comments

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