The No. 1 New York Times Bestseller Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy & 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 & views an apparition: a beautiful woman a vision in white approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet he soon learns & she is dying. & 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 & constantly surprising Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous & yet very flawed people all of them striving towards another sort of life a future that is both delightful & 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 & compelling". (Esquire). " Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you're likely to read this year". (Nick Hornby The Believer). Jess Walter is the author of the National Book Award finalist The Zero & the Edgar Award-winning Citizen Vince. His previous book The Financial Lives of the Poets was published in the UK by Penguin."