'Utterly absorbing, astonishingly inventive, and richly imagined. Dominic Smith is a wizard.' Andrea Barrett, National Book Award Winner and author of Archangel

From the award-winning author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Last Painting of Sara de Vos comes a luminous novel tracing the intertwined fates of a silent-film director and his muse.

Dominic 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 Lumiere 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.

Prizes

Short-listed for Christina Stead Prize for Fiction 2020 (Australia)

Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney and now lives in Seattle. He is the author of five novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, an acclaimed bestseller in Australia, winning both the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the Indie Book of the Year (Fiction) in 2017. In the US, the novel was also a New York Times (NYT) bestseller and named a NYT Book Review Editors' Choice. Dominic has received literature fellowships from the Australia Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. More information can be found on his website: www.dominicsmith.net.