The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet. Hailed by critics and loved by readers of literary and historical fiction, Beautiful Ruins is the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962...and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.
Eerie, terrifying, and unputdownable, The Ruins is Scott Smith's first novel since his acclaimed debut A Simple Plan earned rave reviews and stormed best seller lists. The Ruins follows two American couples enjoying a pleasant, lazy beach holiday together in Mexico. On an impulse, they go off with newfound friends in search of one of their group, the young German who, in pursuit of a girl, has headed for the remote Mayan ruins, site of a fabled archeological dig. This is what happens from the moment the searchers, moving into the wild interior, begin to suspect that there is an insidious, horrific "other" among them.
Classical Athenian literature often speaks of democratic politics in sexual terms. Citizens are urged to become lovers of the polis, and politicians claim to be lovers of the people. Victoria Wohl argues that this was no dead metaphor. Exploring the intersection between eros and politics in democratic Athens, Wohl traces the private desires aroused by public ideology and the political consequences of citizens' most intimate longings. Love among the Ruins analyzes the civic fantasies that lay beneath (but not necessarily parallel to) Athens's political ideology.
Sixteen-year-old Tamara Goodwin’s life is upended when her wealthy father commits suicide after realizing he can’t pay his debts. Tamara and her devastated mother are forced to move from a Dublin suburb to the countryside to live with Tamara’s aunt and uncle, Rosaleen and Arthur. Tamara chafes under Rosaleen’s domineering personality when her aunt tries to keep Tamara from seeing her depressed, isolated mother. Frustrated, Tamara ventures out of the house, exploring the ruins of the castle Arthur cares for and meeting the locals, including a sprightly nun and a handsome young man who drives around in a traveling library.
Archaeologist Finn Ryan and pilot Virgil Hilts are scouring the Sahara for the long-lost tomb of an Apostle when they stumble upon signs of a decades-old murder, along with an ancient Roman medallion bearing the infamous name of a fallen archangel.
But this relic is only the first piece of an enigmatic puzzle that will take Finn and Virgil across the globe from the sinister ruins of an ancient monastery to the wreck of a sunken ship in the Caribbean, to find a truth that might shake the foundations of history-or see them dead.
![The ruins [ Audio + Book]](http://englishtips.org/uploads/posts/2008-09/1222764913_ruins.jpg "The ruins [ Audio + Book]")
