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A sweeping work of historical fiction which 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 One. 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 Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days taking photographs of Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview him about 'The Electric Hotel', the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended his 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 novel 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. 449pp, paperback.