Beaumaris Books
In association with Allen & Unwin

Proudly presents an evening with bestselling
author of ‘The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

Dominic Smith

To coincide with  the release of his new book

THE ELECTRIC HOTEL

When:   Monday 12th August  2019, 7.30pm

             Doors open 7.00

 Where:  BEAUMARIS MOTOR YACHT SQUADRON , 

               Beach Rd near the  corner of Cromer Rd, Beaumaris         

Cost:     $55 includes admission, finger food AND a copy of  The Electric Hotel

               Ticket only $40

               Beverages at bar prices.

**Phone credit card bookings accepted**

Phone: 9589 4638

E-mail: read@beaumarisbooks.com.au     

Bookings Essential

The Electric Hotel–  The new literary masterpiece from the author of the award-winning The Last Painting of Sara de Vos– a luminous new novel tracing the intertwined fates of a silent-film director and his muse.

Paris, 1895: Twenty-year-old Claude Ballard interviews for a job as a 'concession agent' for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema. With a CV that contains a reel of his sister's dying breaths, it's clear how much Claude will put at stake to realise his dreams. While traveling to evangelise this new medium, Claude meets the legendary actress Sabine Montrose, during the last hours of her fortieth birthday in her Manhattan hotel room — and it’s not long before inspiration strikes and his fate is sealed. Los Angeles, 1962: For more than three decades, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of the runaways and 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.

On the origins of the novel, Dominic Smith said: “I’ve long been interested in the gaps and silences of history and with The Electric Hotel, I’m tapping into an entire missing layer of cinematic history. The Library of Congress reports that more than 75% of all silent films are lost forever, so I began with a single question: what if there is a masterpiece we have never seen? That was the leaping off point for this book and for several years of research that took me from the cliffs of Fort Lee, New Jersey to the childhood home of the Lumière brothers to a town in northern Italy that hosts the world’s largest silent film festival every year.”

Spanning three continents and the better part of a century, Dominic Smith takes us on a tour of the heart, to Paris, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Palisades, Los Angeles, Belgium, Andorra and our very own Tamarama.

Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney and now lives in Seattle. He is the author, most recently, of 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. The novel was a New York Times (NYT) bestseller in the US and was named a NYT Book Review Editors’ Choice. It was also named in the Best Books of 2016 by both Amazon and Kirkus. Dominic has received literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Australia Council.