Ravenna Reads Too

Most likely you know, but maybe you don't...Third Place Books has two locations.  And our Ravenna location has been raving about Jess Walter's new book, Beautiful Ruins.  Both Micheal and Caitlin are crazy for this hilarious new novel

Michael says:

This is the perfect summer read.  It is entertaining as all get out and smart and well written to boot.  AND it is a great introduction to a great writer...indulge yourself.

Caitlin says:

Beautiful Ruins is the perfect summer read. It begins in 1964 on the sun-drenched coastline of Italy and unfolds over the next 50 years through multiple perspectives and settings. The twists in this novel kept me interested, and Walter's style kept me laughing throughout. I have to recommend Beautiful Ruins because of its character depth and the portrayal of life as 'a glorious catastrophe'. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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 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; 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.