In 1962, a young innkeeper in Italy spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman approaching him on a boat. He soon learns that she’s an American actress --- and she’s dying. And the story begins again today, 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.

In 1962, a young innkeeper in Italy spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman approaching him on a boat. He soon learns that she’s an American actress --- and she’s dying. And the story begins again today, 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.

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.

Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sun-bleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. However, after the Second World War, their lives start to crack. When Helena's children discover the victim of a brutal murder, it causes everyone's lives to unravel.

Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sun-bleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. However, after the Second World War, their lives start to crack. When Helena's children discover the victim of a brutal murder, it causes everyone's lives to unravel.

Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their 'real lives': Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war.

Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena's husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena --- with their children, Daisy and Ed --- try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same.

Brilliantly told from five points of view, with a magical elegance and suspenseful dark longing, TIGERS IN RED WEATHER is an unforgettable debut novel from a writer of extraordinary insight and accomplishment.