{"product_id":"2940170036363","title":"Beautiful Ruins: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat 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 \u003cem\u003eCleopatra\u003c\/em\u003e 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, \u003cem\u003eBeautiful Ruins\u003c\/em\u003e is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"HarperCollins Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47114997301488,"sku":"2940170036363","price":31.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940170036363_p0.jpg?v=1763699637","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940170036363","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}