Cheryl Colwell

Everything you “know” about yourself today is based on who you decided you were when you were just four or five years old. In your childhood you formed decisions about yourself before you were even capable of thinking logically. Those decisions were based on a child’s emotional survival brain, and they are the foundation of the neural pathways of thought and feelings that are instrumental in forming your identity, both positive AND negative. This is why so many people have challenges in their adult lives, especially when it comes to their personal and professional relationships.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and 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 decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.