The Electric Hotel

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

The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey - America's first movie town - and 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 Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days taking photographs of 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.

The Electric Hotel is a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of movie-making, a luminous romance and a whirlwind trip through the heady, endlessly inventive days of early cinema.



Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia, and now lives in Seattle, Washington. He's the author of the novels The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Bright and Distant Shores, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, and The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Texas Monthly and the Australian. He has been a recipient of literature grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Australia Council for the Arts. He teaches writing in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.



The magic and mystery of cinema in its early days are brilliantly evoked in [this] absorbing, multilayered novel...Exhilarating in its evocation of the creativity of early cinema, and melancholy in its acknowledgement of the passing of time and the dying of dreams, The Electric Hotel is an impressive work.



radiant...a vital and highly entertaining work about the act of creation...so vivid we can imagine every frame



A love letter to the early days of cinema...Smith writes with passion and detail about an extraordinary period in cultural history.



Smith has the historical grounding of E.L. Doctorow, the character discernment of Alice McDermott and the bold whimsy of Mark Helprin. He is a writer of elegance, rich imagination and propulsive plotting.



a novel of . . . epic scope. [...] He brings home . . . how complex silent movies were to make, and how innovative and daring their makers had to be.



Claude Ballard and Sabine Montrose's "Electric Hotel" lives, sadly, only within the pages of this novel. It's the ultimate lost film, unfindable and unseeable no matter how many drawers we open or vaults we scour - and yet so vivid we can imagine every frame, tiger and all.



Smith . . . blends history and fiction to create a world where a tale of hope, love and loss all seems real.



an absorbing, multilayered novel... The Electric Hotel is an impressive work.



The Electric Hotel is a love letter to the early days of cinema... Dominic Smith writes with passion and detail about an extraordinary period in cultural history.



This impressive novel evokes cinema's early days