Beautiful Ruins

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 o [...]
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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"). Jess Walter is the author of the National Book Award finalist "The Zero" and the Edgar Award-winning Citizen Vince. His previous book "The Financial Lives of the Poets" was published in the UK by "Penguin".