Deal: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Best Seller in Fiction
Audible Editor Reviews
Why we think it’s Essential – Jess Walter’s beautiful and shimmering novel was our editors’ pick for Best Book of 2012, so it was an obvious contender as a new Essential. But Essentials can’t simply be flash-in the pan momentary book crushes, the books on this list have to have legs, and we think that Beautiful Ruins certainly qualifies. Sweeping in scope and breadth, the message within this book runs deep and across generations. And Edoardo Ballerini’s magnificent and elegant narration bestows a level of believability and immediacy to the epic themes at play here. —Emily
Publisher’s Summary
Audie Award Nominee, Fiction and Best Solo Narration, 2013
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 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.
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.
Beautiful Ruins
Written by: Jess Walter
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release Date:06-12-12
Publisher: HarperAudio
AND
Get Two FREE Audiobooks of your choice with Audible 30 Days Trial
About the Author
Jess Walter is the author of four novels, the most recent of which is THE ZERO, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. His previous novel, CITIZEN VINCE, was a Washington Post best book of the year and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel.
Victor Dima
Latest posts by Victor Dima (see all)
- Review: Toxic Minds, written and performed by Anthony Lee - July 7, 2025
- Review: Shadow of the Dragon, written by Amy Daniels, narrated by Phillip Nathaniel Freeman and a full cast - July 4, 2025
- Review: My Friends by Fredrik Backman, performed by Marin Ireland – Editor’s Choice Award for Excellence in Entertainment - July 3, 2025
