Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Jess Walter's novel is tipped to be one of the big summer hits of 2013, so we're delighted that it's our book club choice for July. Set in Italy and America, told in different voices, and encompassing the 1960s and the present, the novel was 15 years in the writing - and you can see why. It was a huge hit in America, where it featured on the New York Times bestseller list. Read Jess's answers to gransnetters' questions here.

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 rollercoaster 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 once-great Hollywood 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, 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.

Praise for Beautiful Ruins

“A novel unlike any other you’re likely to read this year.” Nick Hornby

"Magic. Walter is a believer in capricious destiny with a fine, freewheeling sense of humour. . . . A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart." New York Times

We're afraid the 200 free copies of Beautiful Ruins have already gone, but you can still get a copy from Amazon and on kindle.