Beautiful Ruins - Softcover

Walter, Jess

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067092265X ISBN 13: 9780670922659

Publisher: Penguin, 2013

Synopsis

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

About this title

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)

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 067092265X
• ISBN 13: 9780670922659
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368