"The funniest and best novel I've read all year is Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins. Not many satirists can stop on a dime and testify with equal power and intelligence to what is not, for them, a laughing matter." —Richard Russo
Jess Walter's
Beautiful Ruins is an irresistible romp through Italy in the Technicolor era, when a starlet hooked up with the dashingly drunken Richard Burton and charmed the townspeople in a tiny seaside village. The present-day scenes are pretty snazzy, too.
