The novel begins on Jand ends on the same date, clearly not coincidentally, as A Gentleman in Moscow. Like his first two novels, 'The Lincoln Highway' is elegantly constructed and compulsively readable. Mostly confined to a single setting - Moscow's luxurious Metropol Hotel - it spanned 32 years under Stalin's grim rule. His much-loved second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow(2016), incorporated nods toward the great Russian writers and shades of Eloise at the Plaza and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Scott Fitzgerald and its title from George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. His first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), set among social strivers in New York City in 1936, took its inspiration from F. Again, one of the ideas Towles explores is how evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder. Like his first two novels, The Lincoln Highway is elegantly constructed and compulsively readable. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations.

Amor Towles' new Great American Road Novel tails four boys - three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old - as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future.

Amor towles the lincoln highway