A transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel. When, in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous...

After his father's death, Kale Brecht becomes a sullen, withdrawn, and troubled young man. He finds himself under a court-ordered sentence of house arrest after a run in with the law. His mother, Julie, works night and day to support herself and her son, only to be met with Kale's indifference and lethargy. As the walls of his house begin to close in on Kale, he turns into a voyeur as his interests turn outside the windows of his suburban home towards...