Jess Walter · 2012 · exile

Jess Walter's 2012 novel, spanning fifty years and two continents. A dying actress is sent from the Cleopatra set to a village on the Ligurian coast so small it has one hotel and no road - and half a century later an old Italian walks into a Hollywood office to ask what became of her.

1. 1
   Porto Vergogna

   April 1962, and a dying American actress steps off a boat onto the pier of a village of a dozen whitewashed houses below the Cinque Terre - reachable only by sea, and holding one hotel, the Adequate View.

2. 2
   Cinecitta

   Rome, and the Cleopatra shoot: Taylor, Burton, and a production so far out of control that the studio has a fixer whose job is to make inconvenient people disappear quietly to the coast.

3. 3
   Porto Vergogna

   Pasquale comes back with what he has learned, and Dee goes - and the village returns to what it was, with a beach he never finished and a tennis court cut into the cliff.

4. 4
   Seattle

   The American thread: decades of ordinary life happening while the Italian one stays fixed in 1962, which is the trick the novel is built on.

5. 5
   Sandpoint

   Idaho, where Dee ends up - a drama teacher in a small northern town, with a son who plays in bands and a past that nobody local has any reason to ask about.

6. 6
   Edinburgh

   The Fringe, and a washed-up musician doing a one-man show above a pub to an audience of nine - the funniest and saddest section, and the one that brings the present-day characters together.

7. 7
   Hollywood

   Fifty years on, an old Italian walks into a producer's office on a studio lot and asks after a woman nobody there has heard of - which is where the two halves of the book finally meet.

8. 8
   Porto Vergogna

   Back to the village at the end, and the title: not the ruins of Rome or of a career, but people who have got older without ever quite finishing what they started.