From the moment it opens on a rocky patch of Italian coastline circa 1962 when a daydreaming young innkeeper looks out over the water and spies a mysterious woman approaching him on a boat Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins is a dazzling, deeply human roller coaster of a novel from the lavish set of Cleopatra, to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, Beautiful Ruins is gloriously inventive and constantly surprising - a story of flawed yet fascinating people navigating the rocky shores of their lives, while clinging to their improbable dreams.