Beautiful Ruins
Apr 2013 · Penguin UK
4.0star
7 reviewsreport
Ebook
368
Pages
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About this ebook
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
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
Ratings and reviews
4.0
7 reviews
deepankar joshi
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April 10, 2013
The main thing which holds this novel is its pace. The characters are also compelling but not genuine enough to ponder much thought on. The story is good enough but nothing that one might remember 10 years down the line
About the author
Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including The Financial Lives of the Poets and The Cold Millions. Beautiful Ruins was a New York Times bestseller, and We Live in Water was one of Barack Obama's books of 2019. Jess Walter lives in Spokane, Washington with his family.
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