Beautiful Ruins: A Novel [Paperback]

The #1 New York Timesbestseller, now available in paperback—Jess Walter’s “absolute masterpiece” (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author): the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 and resurfaces fifty years later in contemporary Hollywood.

The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestsellerThe Financial Lives of the Poetsreturns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet. Hailed by critics and loved by readers of literary and historical fiction,Beautiful Ruinsis the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962...and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later. 

From the moment it opens—on a rocky patch of Italian coastline, circa 1962, when a daydreaming young innkeeper looks out over the water and spies a mysterious woman approaching him on a boat—Jess Walter'sBeautiful Ruinsis a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel. From the lavish set ofCleopatrato the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood,Beautiful Ruinsis gloriously inventive and constantly surprising—a story of flawed yet fascinating people navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

A monument to crazy love . . . Walter [is] a believer in capricious destiny with a fine, freewheeling sense of humor.Walter is a very, very funny writer and can do Hollywood satire with the best of them. But this is also a novel with a live, beating heart, full of sympathy for its characters and a gut wisdom&Youll want to explore these Ruins.Walter vividly draws a world both tender and cutthroat, where ambition battles reality, daydreams fight doldrums and sometimes win.A marvel, an absolute gem of a beach read that is both hilarious anl³+