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From the New York Times bestselling author Dominic Smith, a radiant novel tracing the intertwined fates of a silent-film director and his museDominic Smith's The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey -- America's first movie town -- and on the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man's doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumire brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel -- the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose -- the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude's memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.



About the Author

Dominic Smith

Dominic Smith is the author of five novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, a New York Times Bestseller and a New York Times Editors' Choice. Sold into more than a dozen countries, the novel was also a "Best Book of the Year" selection by Amazon, Kirkus Reviews, Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle. In the US it was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence from the American Library Association and in the UK for the Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize. In Australia, it was chosen as the Fiction Indie Book of the Year by the Association of Independent Booksellers and the Literary Book of the Year as part of the Australian Book Industry Awards.Dominic's other novels are The Electric Hotel, Bright and Distant Shores, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, and The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, The Australian, and The New York Times. Dominic grew up in Sydney, Australia and now lives in Seattle, Washington.Learn more at www.dominicsmith.net



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