Beautiful Ruins

Pasquale Tursi is the proprietor of the uniquely named “Hotel Adequate View” located in Porto Vergogna. It's a place people arrive at by mistake.

Dee Moray is the Hollywood starlet diagnosed with a terminal condition that gets shuffled off to this “rumour of a town” She is only the second American guest the hotel has seen aside from a failed novelist who, after years of visiting, has only managed to punch out a single thin chapter of a war memoir.

Jump to the present day where we meet Claire Silver the over-educated assistant to one of Hollywood's biggest producers Micheal Deane, a seventy-two-year-old man with “the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl” the result of innumberable “facials, spa treatments, mud baths, cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals, and stem-cell injections.”

Claire is getting pitched by wanna-be screenwriter Shane Wheeler on a movie about the fated (and cannibalistic) 1846 expedition party called “Donner!” (Exclamation mark essential)

Oh, and there's Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor too.

Jess Walters somehow manages to juggle a horde of characters spanning decades and continents. A perfect summer read about thwarted ambition, dashed hopes and beauty amidst the ruins of expectation.