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Dominic Smith

Biography

Dominic Smith

Dominic Smith is the author of six novels, including THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a best book of the year at Amazon, Slate, the San Francisco Chronicle and Kirkus Reviews. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and The Australian, among other publications. He grew up in Sydney, Australia, and now lives in Seattle, Washington.

Books by Dominic Smith

Return to Valetto
by Dominic Smith - Fiction, Historical Fiction

On a hilltop in Umbria sits Valetto. Once a thriving village, centuries of earthquakes, landslides and the lure of a better life have left it neglected. Only 10 residents remain, including the widows Serafino --- three eccentric sisters and their steely centenarian mother --- who live quietly in their medieval villa. Then their nephew and grandson, Hugh, returns. But someone else has arrived before him, laying claim to the cottage where Hugh spent his childhood summers. The captivating and no-nonsense Elisa Tomassi asserts that the family patriarch, Aldo Serafino, a resistance fighter whom her own family harbored, gave the cottage to them in gratitude. This revelation unravels a secret that has impacted Valetto across generations. Who will answer for the crimes of the past?

The Electric Hotel
by Dominic Smith - Fiction, Historical Fiction

For more than 30 years, 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 for 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 run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
by Dominic Smith - Fiction, Historical Fiction

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.