The Electric Hotel Audiobook By Dominic Smith cover art

The Electric Hotel

A Novel

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The Electric Hotel

By: Dominic Smith
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
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About this listen

From the New York Times best-selling 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 rundown 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.

©2019 Dominic Smith (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Hotel France
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What listeners say about The Electric Hotel

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Narrator is stellar!

The story is nice, I did enjoy the whole thing, the structure, the organization, the story and characters. But the narrator my god! I want him to narrate everything, he’s perfect and his accents and voices are so perfect and made the whole thing much more enjoyable and so real. It felt like watching an old movie. Stellar performance. Loved listening to this.

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The descriptions are so vivid!

This is an ever widening portal into the past. Wonderful characters, compelling stories - and a complete wrap up at the end, which is so unusual these days!

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Historical fiction at its best

This book came as recommended to me based upon my previous reading. I downloaded it a while ago and forgot about it. When I discovered I had an unread book in my library I decided to give it a listen. What a transfixing great story about the beginnings of moving pictures World War I tuberculosis stunt work and Hollywood glamour. It’s also one of those great books that spans decades and allows the reader to find out what happens to all the characters he’s become so invested in. I really enjoyed this book and hope others do too

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narrator worth it

the narrator made this book. last third was unneeded, but the rest of the book was very interesting.

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The eElectric Hotel

A wonderful story very well read. Loved it. Got me wondering how much of the story is based on life circumstances

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1 person found this helpful