Walter, Jess Beautiful Ruins: A Novel ISBN 13: 9780061928123

Beautiful Ruins: A Novel - Hardcover

9780061928123: Beautiful Ruins: A Novel
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 
The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his  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 is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.  

“Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.” —Richard Russo

“A ridiculously talented writer.” —New York Times

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Adriana Trigiani Reviews Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruinsis a glorious read for book lovers. From the moment you pick up the novel, it conjures a world that you long to enter. The teal-blue Ligurian Sea laps against a jagged coastline filled with candy-colored houses and open windows. At first glance, you’re dying to get inside those houses and find out what’s going on.

You needn’t worry. Jess Walter has written a sumptuous epic about the real people who make art, spinning illusion for fun, profit, and meaning. There are screen actors, a novelist, and Pasquale, an innkeeper, who keeps his patrons fed and watered on homemade wine and dreams. Among all the shimmer and hope are the lost souls who long to create something, anything. And just as Jess Walter introduces us to these characters, he follows them for fifty years. The journey will delight and captivate you.

You will be crushed when the novelist, Alvis, tracks down a woman whom he believed saved him in his youth, only to take a long walk down a dark hallway into a room where everything he believes and all his hopes shatter in one exchange. Jess Walter can break your heart in one conversation.

If you love the ancient charms of the Italian coast on the Ligurian Sea, if you long for Edinburgh and its cold rain and distant hot sun, and if you love stories of the dream factory that is Hollywood, you will not be able to part from this book until you are finished reading it. Even then, for months afterward, you’ll keep it close so you can reread a passage here and there that moved you.

It’s all here, the illusion and reality, the joy and the shame of the creative life, of life itself. The ingenue Dee, the producer Michael, and the D-girl Claire take you into the world of making movies, the expectations and disappointments, and in an ingenious turn, the author pins the hem of the action with real Hollywood stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who are engaging in a drama of their own in Rome.

Jess Walter has quietly and expertly built a career over six novels that puts him at the forefront of great American writers. Beautiful Ruins is the emerald among the pearls.

From the Back Cover:

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 fifty 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.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherHarper
  • Publication date2012
  • ISBN 10 0061928127
  • ISBN 13 9780061928123
  • BindingHardcover
  • Number of pages352
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780061928178: Beautiful Ruins: A Novel

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780061928178
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2013
Softcover

  • 9780670922659: Beautiful Ruins

    Penguin, 2013
    Softcover

  • 9780241986509: Beautiful Ruins (Penguin Essentials)

    Penguin, 2019
    Softcover

  • 9780062349552: Beautiful Ruins: A Novel (Harper Perennial Olive Editions)

    Harper..., 2015
    Softcover

  • 9780062330543: Beautiful Ruins: A Novel

    Harper, 2014
    Softcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Seller Image

Walter, Jess
Published by Harper (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 10
Seller:
booksXpress
(Bayonne, NJ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780061928123

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 21.70
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Walter, Jess
Published by Harper (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0061928127

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 17.81
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Seller Image

Walter, Jess
Published by Harper (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 5
Seller:
GreatBookPrices
(Columbia, MD, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 18397818-n

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 21.29
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 2.64
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Yankovic, Al
Published by Harper Collins Publishers (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: > 20
Seller:
INDOO
(Avenel, NJ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Brand New. Seller Inventory # 0061928127

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 20.43
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.99
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Walter, Jess
Published by Harper (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0061928127

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 22.30
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Walter, Jess
Published by Harper (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Ergodebooks
(Houston, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # DADAX0061928127

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 27.44
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Walter, Jess
Published by Harper (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Save With Sam
(North Miami, FL, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Brand New!. Seller Inventory # 0061928127

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 27.99
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Seller Image

Jess Walter
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Inc (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Grand Eagle Retail
(Wilmington, DE, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his 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 is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later. "Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece." --Richard Russo"A ridiculously talented writer." --New York Times The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller "The Financial Lives of the Poets" returns with his funniest and most romantic novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 and is rekindled in Hollywood 50 years later. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780061928123

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 28.49
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Walter, Jess
Published by Harper (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Front Cover Books
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover0061928127

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 30.55
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.30
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Walter, Jess
Published by Harper (2012)
ISBN 10: 0061928127 ISBN 13: 9780061928123
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Russell Books
(Victoria, BC, Canada)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Special order direct from the distributor. Seller Inventory # ING9780061928123

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 28.99
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 9.99
From Canada to U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

There are more copies of this book

View all search results for this book