The story begins in 1962. Somewhere 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-- blue as his eyes-- and sees a vision: a slender blond woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. What unfolds from there is a dazzling, yet deeply human, rollercoaster of a novel. Walter is the author of "The Financial Lives of the Poets."
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