Books by Jess Walter

First published in hardcover: New York: Harper, 2009.

National Book Award FinalistThe breakout novel from a writer of extraordinary talent: In the wake of a devastating terrorist attack, one man struggles to make sense of his world, even as the world tries to make use of him Brian Remy has no idea how he got here. Its been only five days since terrorists attacked his city, and Remy is experiencing gaps in his lifeas if he were a stone being skipping across water. He has a self-inflicted gunshot wound that he doesnt remember inflicting. His son wears a black armband and refuses to acknowledge that Remy is still alive. He seems to be going blind. He has a beautiful new girlfriend whose name he doesnt know. And his old partner in the police department, who may well be the only person crazier than Remy, has just gotten his picture on a box of First Responder cereal. And these are the good things in Brian Remys life. While smoke still hangs over the city, Remy is recruited by a mysterious government agency that is assigned to gather all of the paper that was scattered in the attacks. As he slowly begins to realize that hes working for a shadowy intelligence operation, Remy stumbles across a dangerous plot, and with the world threatening to boil over in violence and betrayal, he realizes that hes got to track down the most elusive target of them allhimself. And the only way to do that is to return to that place where everything started falling apart. In the tradition of Catch-22, The Manchurian Candidate, and the novels of Ian McEwan, comes this extraordinary story of searing humor and sublime horror, of blindness, bewilderment, and that achingly familiar feeling that the world has suddenly stopped making sense.

From the author of the bestselling Beautiful Ruins comes The Financial Lives of Poets - a brilliantly funny novel about a man who, in an attempt to save himself, may destroy everything he loves.Meet Matt Prior. He's about to lose his job, his house, his wife, and maybe his sanity too.Financial journalist Matt quit his job to set up a website which couldn't fail. Only now he's woken up to the biggest crisis since the Great Crash, and it has. He's got six days to save his house. It's hard to focus when your wife's having an online affair with her childhood sweetheart, but there are children to think about . . . So when he gets hold of some high-grade dope and finds he can sell a piece on at a profit, he begins to think this might be his salvation.A fabulously funny, heartfelt novel about how we can skate close to the edge of ruin - and pull back.'A beautifully laid-back exultation of the human connections that make life worth living' Metro'Ecstatically funny and unusually big-hearted' Financial Times 'It made me laugh more than any other book I've read this year' Nick Hornby

From Jess Walter, the bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, comes We Live in Water - a darkly funny, utterly compelling collection of stories about the American family.We Live in Water brings to vivid life a world of lost fathers and redemptive con men, of personal struggles and diminished dreams, a world marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made Jess Walter one of America's most talked-about writers. In 'Thief', a blue-collar worker turns unlikely detective to find out which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In 'We Live in Water', a lawyer returns to a corrupt North Idaho town to find the father who disappeared thirty years earlier. In 'Anything Helps', a homeless man has to 'go to cardboard' to raise enough money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book. In 'Virgo', a local newspaper editor tries to get back at his superstitious ex-girlfriend by screwing with her horoscope. The final story transforms slyly from a portrait of Walter's hometown into a moving contemplation of our times.'A ridiculously talented writer' The New York Times'One of my favourite young American writers' Nick Hornby'Darkly funny, sneakily sad, these stories are very, very good' Publisher's Weekly'A witty and sobering snapshot of recession-era America' Kirkus

The No. 1 New York Times BestsellerJess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is a gorgeous, glamorous novel set in 1960s Italy and a modern Hollywood studio.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 and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach.'Magic...A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times'A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor' Booklist'Hilarious and compelling' Esquire