Beautiful Ruins: A Novel - Couverture souple

Jess Walter's funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962...and resurfaces fifty years later in contemporary Hollywood.

No novelist working today has captured the contours of contemporary American life with more humor, wisdom, and generosity of spirit than Jess Walter. Now, in his most commercial novel to date, Walter offers a hilarious, yet bittersweet, fantasia set at the moment when Golden Age Hollywood was about to tumble off a cliff--leaving today's celebrity-mad culture to pick up the pieces.

The story begins in 1962. As rumors begin to trickle out about chaos on the set of the multimillion-dollar epic Cleopatra, a blonde American starlet-- beautiful, mysterious, said to be dying--appears at the Hotel Adequate View, a failing hotel on the Italian coast. A short time later, a fast-talking young publicist shows up-- and, with him, the roguish Richard Burton, rapacious with drink. Pasquale Tursi, the young proprietor of the hotel, has no idea what to make of the publicist or of Burton. He only knows that he has fallen-- hopelessly, haplessly--in love with the starlet.

And it begins again today, in a studio lot in Hollywood--when an elderly Italian man shows up at the office of the publicist, now a legendary producer, asking after the mysterious starlet who came to his hotel fifty years before.

What unfolds from there is a dazzling rollercoaster of a novel, full of Walter's trademark unforgettable characters--from Pasquale and Dee, his mysterious beauty, to the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together, to the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers who populate their world in the decades that follow. Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, The Beautiful Ruins is pure Jess Walter--a novel full of flawed yet utterly relatable people, all of them reaching toward some impossible goal, leading us up a rocky shoreline path toward a future both distant and utterly familiar.

“A monument to crazy love . . . Walter [is] a believer in capricious destiny with a fine, freewheeling sense of humor.” (New York Times)

“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 agut wisdom...You’ll want to explore these Ruins.” (Newsday)

“Walter vividly draws a world both tender and cutthroat, where ambition battles reality, daydreams fight doldrums and sometimes win.” (Interview)

“A marvel, an absolute gem of a beach read that is both hilarious and heartbreaking.” (Huffington Post)

“Expertly scratches the seasonal itch for both literary depth and dazzle.” (Entertainment Weekly)

“Entrancing...Walter’s turns of phrase are as brilliant as his plot twists, making for a compelling, fun read.” (People)

“Lyrical, heartbreaking, and funny . . . Walter closes the deal with such command that you begin to wonder why up till now he’s not often been mentioned as one of the best novelists around. Beautiful Ruins might just correct that oversight.” (Kansas City Star)

“Beautiful . . . A shining, imaginative tale . . . Beautiful Ruins shows novelists how it is done.” (The Plain Dealer)

“His [Walter’s] characters are long-suffering, prone to failure and sometimes at death’s door. But the verve and enthusiasm of this novel, from its let’s-go-everywhere structure to the comedy in the marrow of its sentences, are wholly life-affirming.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

“A beautiful narrative . . . This writer is a genius of the modern American moment.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)