“I recently published a list of books you might want to read this summer. Each of the writers took a meaty subject and made it compelling without sacrificing any complexity.
“I put Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow on my summer books list back in 2019, but I liked this follow-up novel even more. Set in 1954, it’s about two brothers who are trying to drive from Nebraska to California to find their mother; their trip is thrown way off-course by a volatile teenager from the older brother’s past. Towles takes inspiration from famous hero’s journeys and seems to be saying that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as we might hope.
