The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

Literature & Fiction

Dominic Smith

Literary

Atria

Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

Contemporary

Blackstone Audiobooks

The Beautiful Miscellaneous

United States

Blackstone Audio,Inc.

Dominic Smith's beautifully written new novel explores genius and loss, failure and redemption, in this portrait of a son trying to make peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations. Nathan Nelson is above average in everything he does, but his father, a renowned quark physicist, will not give up his quest to uncover his son's latent gifts. Consequently, Nathan has spent his formative years in whiz-kid summer camps, learning college algebra and visiting the Stanford Linear Accelerator. By the time Nathan is seventeen, hopes for a late-blooming prodigy seem dashed, but a tragic accident and ensuing coma leave Nathan with an altered mind that allows him to memorize vast amounts of information. Nathan's father, looking for an application for the new talent, sends him to a research institute where, amid neurological misfits and savants, Nathan tries to find a purpose for the altered way he sees and hears the world.

Nathan Nelson is the average son of a genius. Despite his father's constant prodding, his abilities remain ordinary-until a tragic accident and ensuing coma leave Nathan with a profoundly altered mind.

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”—ten 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. The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre is a story of ruined love, fame unraveling, and a prodigious mind coming undone.

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre: A Novel

Blackstone

In this luminous novel, Dominic Smith reinvents the life of one of photography's founding fathers. In 1839, Louis Daguerre's invention took Paris and 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.

Paediatrics at a Glance

Lawrence Miall

Mary Rudolf

Wiley/Blackwell

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 reading's done. In this extraordinary novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Australian writer Dominic Smith brilliantly 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 Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth. 
In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland as a master painter, the first woman to be so honoured. 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 Manhattan 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 exhibition of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive.
As the three threads intersect with increasing and exquisite suspense, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerises while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.

Last Painting of Sara de Vos, The

Bolinda Audio

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Books by Dominic Smith