The Electric Hotel, Dominic Smith
The Electric Hotel, Dominic Smith
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

The Electric Hotel
A Novel

Author: Dominic Smith

Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini

Unabridged: 11 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/04/2019


Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author Dominic Smith, a radiant audiobook 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 Lumière 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 Dominic Smith

Dominic Smith is the author of six novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was named a best book of the year by Slate, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Kirkus Reviews. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Australian, among other publications. He grew up in Sydney, Australia, and now lives in Seattle, Washington.

About Edoardo Ballerini

Edoardo Ballerini is an American writer, director, film producer and actor.  He has won many awards for his audiobook narration; within only a few years after beginning his narrating career, he won several AudioFile Earphones Awards for his work, including Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How The World Became Modern, Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins.   He narrated Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel Prize Winning Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Joseph Finder’s The Moscow Club as well as works by John Edward and Daniel Stashower.   In television and film, he is best known for his role in The Sopranos, 24, I Shot Andy Warhol, Dinner Rush and Romeo Must Die. The silky-voiced Ballerini is trained in theater and continues to do much work on stage.


Reviews

Goodreads review by karen on September 20, 2019

well, every book its reader &yadda… i won this in a gr giveaway, and when it arrived, i admired it as a physical object, but upon reading the synopsis i was all, “why did i…?” until i remembered i had entered the giveaway because this was the author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which i had he......more

Goodreads review by Blaine on November 06, 2022

Just a great historical fiction book about an individual who was part of the original motion picture industry in France and then came to the US. Superbly researched, this is a great look at the early movie industry from the Lumiere` brothers, to the early beginnings of the silent movie industry and......more

Goodreads review by Sue on June 21, 2019

The Electric Hotel is a love letter to an earlier time, not necessarily an easier time, but the early years of film, a time of adventure, excitement, exploration, wild success and horrible failure. Also a time of new techniques, new materials and much thinking on one’s feet. It is also a love letter......more

Goodreads review by Dale on June 17, 2019

Claude Ballard, is an eighty five year old man at the beginning of this story. He is waiting for Martin Embry, a film buff and historian who wants to learn about Claude’s career as one of the early exponents of the silent film industry. From this meeting between the two men in 1962, the story retrac......more

Goodreads review by Katie on January 12, 2022

I loved The lost Painting of Sara de Vos. This, I think, is an earlier novel by the same author. It tells the story of the life of Claude Ballard, the director of the most ambitious silent film of its time but since forgotten. We meet Claude when he's old and living alone in a downtrodden Hollywood......more