Meet "Beautiful Ruins" author Jess Walter | The Arizona Republic's August pick
08/17/2012 7:00 pm
Changing Hands Bookstore is proud to partner with The Arizona Republic for their monthly "Republic Recommends" selections. August's pick: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.
7pm, Friday August 17 • Meet Jess Walter
National Book Award finalist and Edgar Award-winning author Jess Walter visits with his New York Times bestselling novel Beautiful Ruins. It's the Arizona Republic's current "Republic Recommends" selection, which means it's 25% OFF all month!
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR JESS WALTER is the author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, the Edgar Award-winning Citizen Vince, Land of the Blind, and the New York Times Notable Book Over Tumbled Graves. He is also a career journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family. More »
