{"product_id":"9780670922659","title":"Beautiful Ruins","description":"\u003ch3\u003eAuthor: Jess Walter\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003ch4\u003eModern \u0026amp; contemporary fiction (post c 1945)\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003ch5\u003ePublished on 30 May 2013 by Penguin Books Ltd in the United Kingdom.\u003c\/h5\u003e\u003ch4\u003ePaperback | 368 pages\u003cbr\u003e129 x 197 x 33mm | 252g\u003c\/h4\u003e\u003chr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe No. 1 New York Times BestsellerJess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGloriously 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times'A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor'  Booklist'Hilarious and compelling'  Esquire'Beautiful Ruins is a novel unlike any other you're likely to read this year'  Nick Hornby, The Believer\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jess Walter","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57548671058245,"sku":"9780670922659","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0994\/3721\/6069\/files\/9780670922659.jpg?v=1774887173","url":"https:\/\/stripyduckbookshopcafe.co.uk\/products\/9780670922659","provider":"The Stripy Duck Bookshop Café","version":"1.0","type":"link"}