Beautiful Ruins
Spring of 1962. A young Italian innkeeper named Pasquale watches a beautiful, doomed American actress walk off a boat onto the rocks of his tiny Ligurian fishing village, and decades later a Hollywood producer's assistant in Los Angeles is still tracing the consequences. Jess Walter braids together six decades and four continents, the chaos of the Cleopatra production at Cinecitta, a fictionalized Richard Burton, an aging GI poet, a wannabe screenwriter pitching a Donner Party musical, and the woman whose path through all of them keeps the book in motion. The result is a generous, bittersweet novel about ambition and the quiet near-misses that shape a life, written with the snap of an old movie and the patience of a long Italian dinner.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Beautiful Ruins
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1962, a beautiful American starlet steps onto a tiny Italian fishing village's dock. Fifty years later, an aging Italian innkeeper walks into a Hollywood pitch meeting carrying a battered photograph.
Beautiful Ruins is fictional but features real historical figures including Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in cameo roles, and is partly set during the troubled 1962 production of Cleopatra. Jess Walter combines real Hollywood history with invented characters.
A film adaptation has been in development with Todd Field attached at various points. As of 2025, the project remains in development with no confirmed release date.
Beautiful Ruins was written by Jess Walter, published in 2013 by Penguin UK.
Beautiful Ruins is 364 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Beautiful Ruins takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
Beautiful Ruins is a standalone novel by Jess Walter, not part of a series.
Beautiful Ruins is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.