Booklover Book Reviews

Beautiful Ruins Book Description

The story begins in 1962. 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 spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio’s back lot – searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning 50 years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist, and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion – along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow.

Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams. (Harper Audio)

My teaser:

Twenty metres away Pasquale watched the arrival of the woman as if in a dream, or rather he would think later, a dream’s opposite, a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep. Pasquale straightened and stopped what he was doing, what he was usually doing that spring, trying to construct a beach below his family’s empty pensione. (Audio Chapter 1)

I have only just started this audiobook but the story and Edoardo Ballerini’s narration is absolutely captivating.

I thoroughly enjoyed Jess Walter’s previous title The Financial Lives of the Poets and early reviews are saying this novel is even better!

Find out more about this book - Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.

Looking forward to reading your teasers!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

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