Table for Two

When I am introduced to spectacularly well-written characters, I find that they stay with me. Their stories become anecdotes I am tempted to pepper into conversations, as if they are friends-of-friends whose lives have become peripherally entwined with mine. And on the very off chance that an author decides to revisit these people in a new work, it feels like a class reunion, rife with satisfying emotional tension and redoubled curiosity.

In Table for Two, two-time BOTY finalist Amor Towles brings back to life the unforgettable Eva Ross from his masterpiece Rules of Civility. We see her through a brilliant kaleidoscopic lens of different side characters—a fellow train passenger, a hotel guest, an athlete at a bar—who all find themselves equally entranced by her glamor and poise against a backdrop of 1930s Hollywood. But for the uninitiated, there is plenty of new scenery here, too, as we travel from communist Russia to 1990s New York, Towles’s signature prose sweeping us across decades.

There really is something for everyone in this collection: vivid and unique characters; keen observations about marriage, status, and social class; and transporting descriptions of iconic settings. Towles has crafted a delicious cornucopia—indulge!

Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.

The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages.

In Towles’s novel Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September 1938 with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of Los Angeles.

Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction.