Beautiful Ruins

In 1962, at a sun-drenched Italian hotel, a young innkeeper spies a woman on a boat—a vision in white. She is an actress and she is dying. The story begins again today when a retired Italian man arrives at the movie studio where he first saw her 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.