‘A fantastically moody, unsettling novel, with a teasing, enigmatic atmosphere entirely its own’ SARAH WATERS’Intensely lyrical and powerfully haunting… Sublime storytelling and Gothic fiction at its very best!’ SUSAN STOKES-CHAPMAN’A novel about wild, dissident passion, the profound dislocations of grief, and the intoxication of composition’ NAOMI BOOTH’A beautiful, hallucinatory dream of a novel’ J.M. MIROThere is a beast inside her, a monster. It wants to scream, it wants to tear things apart.
1816. Mary, eighteen years old, is staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley. She is tormented by his infidelities; haunted by the loss of her baby daughter.
Then one evening with friends, as storms rage outside and laudanum stirs their imaginations, Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story, and something fierce and wild awakens in Mary.
Memories surface of the long, strange summer she once spent with a family in Scotland, where she found herself falling in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter. She learned tales of mythical beasts, witches and spirits. And she encountered real monsters – both in the rocky wilds, and far, far closer to home…
Illuminating the past like a flash of lightning, this brilliant reimagining of the birth of Frankenstein takes us into a feverish world of waking dreams-where grief mingles with desire, and the veil between beauty and horror grows thin.
PRAISE FOR FOR MARY’Like reading a laudanum dram’ ANNIE GARTHWAITE, author of Cecily’Rich, intricate and beguiling, this is a novel of enormous insight, great heart and incredible skill’ NELL STEVENS’A novel that tiptoes and whispers, woos and caresses like the darkest of fairytales’ JOANNE BURN, author of The Hemlock Cure’A literary creation story as bold, terrifying, and riveting as Frankenstein itself’ LAURIE LICO ALBANESE’A lyrical dream of a book that strays into the nightmarish, the gothic and the eerie with an assured elegance’ ELIZABETH LEE, author of Cunning Women’Mary reveals the rich inner life of one of the world’s greatest creative imaginations’ Sarah Sheridan’Creative confirmation of Shelley’s position as the mother of all goth girls. A moody and evocative reveal of the backstory (behind the backstory) of Frankenstein’ KIRKUS’A nuanced, beautifully atmospheric portrayal of a young woman’s intense inner life, foreshadowing Frankenstein’s themes of grief, loneliness, and the desire for love’ BOOKLIST
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