Dominic Smith Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Dominic Smith
Dominic Smith was born in 1971 in Brisbane, Australia. He grew up in the Blue Mountains and Sydney, Australia. His Australian mom worked as a secretary and his dad was an American corporate manager. Dominic, one of four kids, was eight years old when his parents separated. The next year, the family home burned down and his mom suffered a stroke and was disabled as a result, causing the family to struggle to make ends meet.

He graduated from college at the age of 23 with a BA in anthropology. In 2003, he finished an MFA in creative writing on a Michener Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin.

His short fiction has appeared in various journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly and The Chicago Tribune; and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

“Bright and Distant Shores” was shortlisted for Australia’s Vance Palmer Fiction Prize and The Age Book of the Year, and was a selection for Kirkus Reviews’ “Best Books of 2011”. Dominic’s awards include the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, the Texas Institute of letters, and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize.

“The mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre” was chosen for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. It also received the Steven Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. “The Beautiful Miscellaneous” was a Booklist Editors’ Pick.

“The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2006. A brilliant and atmospheric novel of photography, Paris, madness, and love.

When the vision came, he was in the bathtub. So starts the madness of Louis Daguerre. In the year 1847, after ten years of using poisonous mercury vapors to cure his Daguerreotype images, his mind becomes plagued by these delusions. Believing that the world is going to end in just a year. Daguerre creates this ‘Doomsday List’, which is a list of 10 items that he must photograph before this final day. The list includes a portrait of Isobel Le Fournier, a woman that he’s always loved but not spoken to for half a century now.

Dominic Smith, in this luminous novel, reinvents the life of one of photography’s founding fathers. Louis Daguerre’s tale is set against the backdrop of this Paris that is prone to social unrest and bohemian excess. It’s here, amid this beguiling and odd setting, which Louis sets off in order to capture these doomsday subjects.

Louis enlists the help of Charles Baudelaire (a womanizing poet) and Pigeon (one beautiful and jaded prostitute). Together these two scour the Paris underworld for the images worthy of Daguerre’s list. However Louis is also being confronted by this chance to reunite with the one and only woman that he has ever loved. Isobel Le Fournier, half a lifetime ago, kiss Louis Daguerre in this wine cave just outside of Orleans. The result was this proposal, then a rejection, and a total misunderstanding which outlasted three kings and one emperor. Now, Louis wants to understand, in the countdown to his apocalypse, why he has carried the memory of such a kiss for so very long.

“The Beautiful Miscellaneous” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2007. Nathan Nelson is a genius’ average son. His dad, who is a physicist of small renown, has been prodding him toward greatness from an early age. Taking him to the icy tundra of Canada in order to track a solar eclipse, enrolling him in whiz kid summer camps, and teaching him college level algebra. However Nathan still remains ordinary, despite Samuel Nelson’s efforts.

All of it changes during the summer of 1987. While he visits his small town grandpa in Michigan, he’s involved in a horrible accident. After a short clinical death, which he later remembers being a lackluster affair which lasts less than the length of a Top 40 song, he falls into a coma. Nathan, upon awakening, finds that everyday life is radically different now. His perceptions of sound, sight, and memory have been changed irrevocably. The doctors and his parents fear permanent brain damage. However the truth of this condition of his is much more unexpected and it leads to this renewed chance for Nathan to find his own place in this world.

Samuel, now thinking that his son’s altered brain is worthy of more serious inquiry, arranges for Nathan to attend the Brook-Mills Institute, which is a Midwestern research center where prodigies, savants, and neurological misfits get studied and their specialties are applied. Immersed in such an odd atmosphere, where one autistic boy is able to tell you what day Christmas will fall in 3026 however is unable to tie his own shoelaces, where one medical intuitive is able to diagnose cancer during one long distance phone call with a patient, Nathan is able to unravel the mysterious of this new mind of his. He also attempts to make peace with the crushing weight of his dad’s expectations.

Dominic delivers a dazzling novel which explores the fault lines which can cause a family to drift apart and the unexpected events which can pull them back together.

“Bright and Distant Shores” is the third stand alone novel and was released in 2011. A sweeping historical novel that’s set amid the skyscrapers of 1890s Chicago and the far flung islands of the South Pacific.

During the waning years of the nineteenth century there was this hunger for tribal artifacts, which spawns collecting voyages from collectors and museums all around the globe. In the year 1897, one of these collectors, who is a Chicago insurances magnate, sponsors one expedition into the South Seas in order to commemorate the completion of his company’s brand new skyscraper, which is the world’s tallest building now. The ship is set to bring back this array of Melanesian handicrafts and weaponry, however also several natives related by blood.

Caught up in his scheme are these two orphans: Owen Graves (an itinerant trader hailing from Chicago’s South Side who’s just proposed to the girl he’s forced to leave behind) and Argus Niu (a mission houseboy in the New Hebrides that longs to get reunited with his sister). Right at the cusp of the twentieth century, this expedition forces a collision course between the civilized and the tribal, and between the two young men plagued by their respective and haunting pasts.