Beautiful Ruins
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.82 (757 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B008ARPV8Q |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 578 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-03-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A True Gem What a wonderful book! It's a beautifully told tale of love lost and found. It tugs at the heartstrings, but it's not depressing. The settings are wonderful, from a tiny Italian fishing village in 1962 to present day Hollywood, the northwest, and the U.K. The characters are wonderfully drawn. The actor Richard Burton even makes an appearance. The plot is unique. There's romance, but I wouldn't classify it as a romance. There's dark humor, but not slapstick laugh-out-loud humor. There's no explicit sex or violence. It's an exquisitely written, character-driven story that's perfect for summer. There are so many bestsellers that f. A Beautiful Story told by a Master Writer I loved this novel. This writer is truly an old soul who knows how to make the reader laugh until tears roll, without making the story shallow, who has the ability to paint a perfect picture without boring the reader to tears, to break from one story line into a completely new story line without losing or annoying the reader, but rather immediately catching the reader up in an entirely new plot. He has the ability to create multiple story lines all at once, flipping from one to the other, seamlessly and all-enthralling.The story of the Hollywood "would-be" Producer, Claire, made me laugh until I had tear streaming down my face.. "Bellísimo! Splendido!" according to Maryellen. What a lovely story author Jess Walter tells us in BEAUTIFUL RUINS!It was 1962 and Pasquale Tursi looked out into the Ligurian Sea from his little beach below his little hotel in his little village of Porto Vergogna, Italy and saw a vision. He saw a beautiful woman. That woman was an American actress named Dee Moray who was in Italy working on THE movie Cleopatra with THE Liz Taylor, THE Richard Burton and with Hollywood heavy hitter, Michael Deane. And Dee Moray was dying.No one ever came to Porto Vergogna, Port Shame, to visit. This must be a mistake. It is and it isn't."Sometimeswhat we want to do and what we must do are not
Audie Award Nominee, Fiction and Best Solo Narration, 2013The story begins in 1962. 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. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. 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.. 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. 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 Ligu