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Sign up todayThe Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
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Learn moreIn 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, in this moving story of ruined love, fame unraveling, and a prodigious mind coming undone.
Dominic Smith is the author of The Beautiful Miscellaneous. He is a former recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. He grew up in Australia and now lives in Austin, Texas, where he received an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Writers.
Stephen Hoye has worked as a professional actor in London and Los Angeles for more than thirty years. Trained at Boston University and the Guildhall in London, he has acted in television series and six feature films and has appeared in London’s West End. His audiobook narration has won him fifteen AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“Highly entertaining.”
“Smith renders a clear-eyed portrait of Daguerre and his thinking, against a backdrop of tumultuous times.”
“Stephen Hoye narrates with joy and expertise. Here is listening intensity that makes the brain create an imaginary world that diminishes reality.”
“Smith’s beautifully written debut uses the life of photography’s inventor as the framework for a touching tale of youthful love regained in maturity…A compelling psychological study, a thoughtful tracing of the birth of a new art form, and an atmospheric portrait of nineteenth-century France: impressive on all three counts.”
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