The Beautiful Miscellaneous Book

Critically acclaimed author Dominic Smith's Dazzling second novel explores the fault lines that can cause a family to drift apart and unexpected events that can pull them back together

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 and teaching him college algebra. But despite Samuel Nelson's efforts, Nathan remains ordinary.

Then, while visiting his grandfather in the summer of 1987, Nathan is involved in a terrible accident. When he awakens from a coma, his perceptions of sight, sound, and memory are radically irrevocably different. The doctors and his parents fear permanent brain damage, but the truth of his condition is more unexpected.

Nathan attends the Brook-Mills Insitute where savants, prodigies, and neurological misfits are studied. Immersed in this strange atmosphere, he begins to unravel the mysteries of his new mind and tries to make peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations.

"This unusual, gorgeously written novel is filled with pleasures." Booklist(starred review)

Dominic Smith is the author of The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, which won the Texas Institute of Letters' Debut Fiction Award. His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. He grew up in Austrailia and now lives in Austin, Texas. Please visit Dominic's website at www.dominicsmith.net.

Publishers Weekly

Smith's novel of the painfully ordinary son of a brilliant scientist, and his sudden acquisition of marvelous powers of memory, is read by Garcia with a taste for melodrama. Garcia's melodramatic streak is understated, prodded less by emoting than by tone of voice and careful pauses. Each sentence ends with a slight downturn, as if inflated hopes have rapidly dwindled to nothingness. Garcia, a stage actor by training, treats Smith's novel as an extended monologue to be performed, summoning the moods and sensations of its prose via subtle shifts of emphasis. The result is a performance-driven audiobook, rendered in minimalist fashion. Simultaneous release with the Atria hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 23). (July)