Dominic Smith has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 8 ratings. The most-rated is The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Summary
A masterful new story charts the circuitous course of the sole surviving work of a female Dutch painter. This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the audio's done. In his award-winning earlier novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth. In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain - a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she's curating an exhibit of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive. As the three threads intersect, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerizes while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present. This audiobook includes a reading group guide read by the author.
©2016 Dominic Smith (P)2016 Macmillan Audio
The Beautiful Miscellaneous
Summary
A dazzling novel from the best-selling author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, winner of the 2017 Indie Prize for Literary Fiction.
Nathan Nelson is the average son of a genius. His father, a physicist of small renown, has prodded him toward greatness from an early age, but despite Samuel Nelson's efforts Nathan remains ordinary.
Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. Nathan is involved in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. When he awakens, he finds that everyday life is radically different. His perceptions of sight, sound and memory have been irrevocably changed. The doctors and his parents fear permanent brain damage, but the truth of his condition is more unexpected and leads to a renewed chance for Nathan to find his place in the world.
Thinking that his son's altered brain is worthy of serious inquiry, Samuel arranges for Nathan to attend a research centre where savants, prodigies and neurological misfits are studied and their specialities applied. Immersed in this strange atmosphere - where an autistic boy can tell you what day Christmas falls on in 3026 but can't tie his shoelaces - Nathan begins to unravel the mysteries of his new mind and finally makes peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations.
©2007 Dominic Smith (P)2007 Blackstone Audio Inc.
The Electric Hotel
Summary
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
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Summary
In this luminous novel, Dominic Smith reinvents the life of one of photography's founding fathers. In 1839, Louis Daguerre's invention took the world by storm. A decade later, he is sinking deep into delusions brought on by exposure to mercury, the very agent that allowed his daguerreotype process. Believing the world will end within one year, he creates his "Doomsday List", 10 items he must photograph before the final day. It includes a woman he has always loved but has not seen in half a century. Paris in 1847 was a city of Bohemian excess and social unrest. Into this strange and beguiling world, Louis Daguerre sets off to capture his doomsday images, with the help of the womanizing poet Baudelaire and a beautiful prostitute named Pigeon, in this moving story of ruined love, fame unraveling, and a prodigious mind coming undone.
©2006 Dominic Smith (P)2006 Blackstone Audiobooks
Bright and Distant Shores
Summary
A sweeping historical novel set amid the skyscrapers of 1890s Chicago and the far-flung islands of the South Pacific.
In the waning years of the 19th century there was a hunger for tribal artifacts, spawning collecting voyages from museums and collectors around the globe. In 1897, one such collector, a Chicago insurance magnate, sponsors an expedition into the South Seas to commemorate the completion of his company's new skyscraper - the world's tallest building. The ship is to bring back an array of Melanesian weaponry and handicrafts, but also several natives related by blood.
Caught up in this scheme are two orphans: Owen Graves, an itinerant trader from Chicago's South Side who has recently proposed to the girl he must leave behind, and Argus Niu, a mission houseboy in the New Hebrides who longs to be reunited with his sister. At the cusp of the 20th century, the expedition forces a collision course between the tribal and the civilised, between two young men plagued by their respective and haunting pasts.
An epic and ambitious story that brings to mind E. L. Doctorow, with echoes of Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, Bright and Distant Shores is a wondrous achievement by a writer known for creating compelling fiction from the fabric of history.
©2011 Dominic Smith (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing