Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter
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
Product Details
About Jess Walter
Reviews for Beautiful Ruins
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
My absolute favourite read this year
Nick Curtis
Evening Standard 'Books of the Year'
A bravura feat
Peter Kemp
Sunday Times 'Books of the Year'
The beach read of 2013
Grazia 'Books of the Year'
Think Il Postino with a walk-on part for a comically drunk Richard Burton
Peter Brookes
The Times 'Books of the Year'
Walter's account of the filming of the Burton/Taylor classic Cleopatra is a playful imagining of emotional history and hidden lives just out of view. Be warned, this is a novel that may make any festive guests somewhat anti-social as I read it in two days flat
Olivia Cole
GQ 'Books of the Year'