Beautiful Ruins

By (author) Walter Jess
Short description/annotation:
Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.
Description:

The No. 1 New York Times Bestseller

Jess Walter''s Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio.

The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio''s back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.

Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach.

''Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart'' New York Times

''A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor'' Booklist

''Hilarious and compelling'' Esquire

''Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you''re likely to read this year'' Nick Hornby, The Believer

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Just about the perfect summer read. It is intelligent and thought-provoking, but also a lot of fun. Reading hours fly by and reaching the final page feels like a genuine wrench
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Ambitious, large-hearted, exhilarating novel that leaves you wanting more . . . Very, very funny
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Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you''re likely to read this year
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Romantic, very funny...Turbo-charged satire meets a Garcia Marquezesque love story. What''s not to like?
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Walter creates an epic here - one that took him 15 years to write. The end result, however, is well worth the wait
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A sparkling summer read
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Thoroughly enjoyable, a tender, funny, ridiculous tale which has love at its core and a keen satirical edge to cut through the lovely, lush romanticism
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You''re going to love this book
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A brilliant, madcap meditation on fate
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A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor
Biographical note:
Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including The Financial Lives of the Poets and The Cold Millions. Beautiful Ruins was a New York Times bestseller, and We Live in Water was one of Barack Obama''s books of 2019. Jess Walter lives in Spokane, Washington with his family.