Beautiful Ruins

Author(s): Walter, Jess,
Binding: Paperback,
Date of Publication: 30/05/2013,
Pagination: 368 pages,
Series: N/A,
Imprint: Penguin USA,
Published By: Penguin Putnam Inc,
Book Classification: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
ISBN13\EAN\SKU: 9780670922659

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.