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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 and views an apparition- a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying. And 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 and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach. 'You're going to love this book. New York Times Book Review 'Hilarious and compelling. Esquire 'Nothing less than brilliant.' Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk '. . . ambitious, large-hearted exhilarating novel that leaves you wanting more.' The Times '. . . sly and sophisticated beach read.' The Guardian '. . . there's reason this book spend several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list- it is quite simply the ultimate brainy beach read.' Harper's Bazaar