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.
Review
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 (Sunday Times)
Ambitious, large-hearted, exhilarating novel that leaves you wanting more... Very, very funny (The Times)
Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you're likely to read this year (Nick Hornby)
Romantic, very funny...Turbo-charged satire meets a Garcia Marquezesque love story. What's not to like? (Daily Mail)
Walter creates an epic here - one that took him 15 years to write. The end result, however, is well worth the wait (Observer)
A sparkling summer read (Telegraph)
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 (Sunday Express)
You're going to love this book (New York Times Book Review)
A brilliant, madcap meditation on fate (Kirkus Reviews)
A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor (Booklist)
The beach read of the summer (Vogue)
Hilarious and compelling (Esquire)
Magic. Walter is a believer in capricious destiny with a fine, freewheeling sense of humour... A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart (New York Times)
Poignant, comical and marvellous (San Francisco Chronicle)
Larger-than-life characters, billowy romance and crafty satire... Any book that includes Richard Burton as a character is fine by us (Esquire)
Cinematic and utterly romantic... the big beach read for summer (Sunday Times)
About the Author
Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including The Financial Lives of the Poets, published by Penguin. Beautiful Ruins was a New York Times bestseller. Jess Walter lives in Spokane, Washington with his family.
