The Electric Hotel

From the award-winning author of the acclaimed bestseller The Last Painting of Sara de Vos comes a radiant new novel tracing the intertwined fates of a silent film director and his muse.`The Electric Hotel`winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey - America`s first movie town and 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 taking photographs of 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 a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of movie-making, a luminous romance and a whirlwind trip through the heady, endlessly inventive days of early cinema.