Come for wine, munchies, laughter and
girlfriend time.
January Book Club
Friday, January 30 7:00pm
Katie Hamada Randolph’s home: 1143 Tyrell
Avenue
Celebrate the new year with your resolution to
read more! Join the Book Club for our first
get-together of 2015. Meet fun ladies who
enjoy wine, chocolates, appetizers – and, oh
yes, a good book! We laugh, we catch up and
we discuss the plot line, characters, and
motives within the book.
Book Selection:
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
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 lotundefinedsearching 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 motionundefinedalong
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.
About the author: Jess Walter is the author of
eight books. He's been a #1 New York Times
bestseller, a finalist for the 2006 National
Book Award and the PEN/USA Literary prize
in both fiction and nonfiction, and won the
2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award. His work has
been published in 30 languages and his short
fiction has appeared in Best American Short
Stories, Harpers, McSweeney's, Esquire and
elsewhere.
