Dominic Smith

Praise for "The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre"

The New York Times Book Review:
"Highly entertaining...Smith is fascinating when he dramatizes, in a series of rhythmic flashbacks, Daguerre's apprenticeship to a Parisian stage designer and the remarkable steps by which he discovered how to create a lasting photograph.
Smith writes vividly...[and] has a talent for descriptive imagery...he captures nicely Daguerre's passionate interest in sunlight..."

Los Angeles Times:
"Smith writes beautifully of Daguerre's fascination with light...[and] refreshes our eyes. In a world awash in photographs, he makes us marvel anew at these efforts to outwit mortality, these "mirrors with a memory."


Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review):
"Smith's beautifully written debut...A compelling psychological study, a thoughtful tracing of the birth of a new art form and an atmospheric portrait of 19th-century France: impressive on all three counts."

The Boston Globe:
"[a] lyrical debut novel...poetic and darkly romantic...a fully imagined and wildly sensual world..."

Dallas Morning News:
"[a novel] full of hallucinatory and beautifully rendered images...a richly promising start to the literary career of Mr. Smith."

The Austin Chronicle:
"Smith writes with the fastidiousness of a miniaturist, and even the smallest details are intricately painted...each page promises uncommon and beautiful words..."

Austin American-Statesman:
"...a striking meditation on memories and photography...luminous prose...poetic language used in service of novelistic intent..."

Detroit Free Press:
"[a] vibrant first novel...Smith has an artist's eye and gives Daguerre an artist's heart."

"It is a book as haunting as a daguerreotype: true in its details, but pesteringly strange; and as beautiful as if it were written not in words but in light."
--Stephen Harrigan, author of "The Gates of the Alamo"

"A splendid novel. You don’t often see such a graceful command of historical detail in a first book. Or such striking and elegant prose. Dazzling and wondrous."
--John Dalton, author of "Heaven Lake"

Critical Praise:

"Fantastic...an utterly fresh look at how a child can grow beyond parental expectations and find the genius of being himself." --People, four stars

"This unusual, gorgeously written novel is filled with pleasures...Best of all, though, is the book’s invitation to wonder--about the imponderables of life and death, the nature of intelligence, and the ultimately inexplicable relationships of fathers and sons." (Starred Review) Booklist

"...[a] finely modulated second novel...the unerringly true dialogue is a delight...a luminous addition to novels about fathers and sons..." Kirkus Reviews

"[Smith] conjures Nathan's colorful, mysterious new existence with vivid detail. The real story in this touching, gracefully wrought novel lies around the edges of the plot. It is really about the weight of family dreams and expectations..." The Boston Globe

"With an exquisite ear not just for language but for emotional truth as well, Dominic Smith has written an ambitious and strikingly unusual tale about what it's like to grow up in the shadow of a brilliant father and under the force of his expectations. I finished this book in awe of Smith's imagination--and of his enormous heart." --Julia Glass, author of "Three Junes" and "The Whole World Over"

"The Beautiful Miscellaneous is one of the most original coming-of-age stories I’ve read in a long time. It’s about gawkiness, particle physics, bereavement, and memory, but it’s also a dazzling inquiry into a universe that is at once breathtakingly elegant and irrevocably mundane. Anomalies, graces, the tedium of grief—it’s all here, cast in Dominic Smith’s smooth, dazzling prose."
--Anthony Doerr, author of "The Shell Collector" and "About Grace"

"The gifts of knowledge that failure brings is the subject of this deft and generous novel about fathers and sons. The phenomenon of love being still, pretty much, the most extraordinary phenomenon of them all, withstanding the ambitions of lesser dreams." --Joy Williams, author of "Honored Guest" and "The Quick and the Dead"

About the book:
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—enrolling him in whiz kid summer camps, taking him to the icy tundra of Canada to track a solar eclipse, and teaching him college algebra. But despite Samuel Nelson’s efforts, Nathan remains ordinary.

Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. While visiting his small-town grandfather in Michigan, Nathan is involved in a terrible accident. After a brief clinical death—which he later recalls as a lackluster affair lasting less than the length of a Top-40 pop song—he falls into a coma. When he awakens, Nathan 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 the Brook-Mills Institute—a Midwestern research center where savants, prodigies, and neurological misfits are studied and their specialties 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, where a medical intuitive can diagnose cancer during a long-distance phone call with a patient—Nathan begins to unravel the mysteries of his new mind. He also tries to make peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations.