The Electric Hotel

From the award-winning author of the acclaimed bestseller The Last Painting of Sara de Vos comes a luminous new 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.

"The Electric Hotel is one of the most hotly anticipated books of the year. It’s Australian-born author Dominic Smith’s follow up to the critically acclaimed and bestselling The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. This too, is a story of love, death and the creation of a masterpiece. Taking readers from Paris to New York, Sydney, the Western Front, and beyond, Dominic Smith’s meticulously researched journey through the birth of cinema is moving, exhilarating, and will captivate you long after that final page. It’s historical fiction at it’s absolute best." – Ben Hunter, Booktopian Review