Beautiful Ruins
-
-
4.5 • 22 Ratings
-
-
- $15.99
Publisher 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.
'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
Customer Reviews
A great read
Loved it!
5 Stars!
This novel really captured my heart. I read this book while staying on the Italian Riviera and the compelling story of an Italian hotel owner bewitched by a beautiful American actress really came to life. This isn't a book filled with Italian cliches and corny love scenes, it has real heart, and real heartbreak. The characters are multi dimensional, just like their stories. Such a beautiful read! 5 stars!