Mary: or, the Birth of Frankenstein

(Paperback)

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New in paperback: gothic, fantasy-tinged historical fiction, delving back into the teenage years of Mary Shelley to find the inspiration for Frankenstein.As darkness falls and storms rage over Lake Geneva, a group of friends gather in a candle-lit villa. Among them is eighteen-year-old Mary, who has run away with her mercurial lover Percy Shelley. As laudanum stirs their feverish imaginations, their host Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story.Suddenly Mary is transported back to a long, strange summer in the wilds of Scotland, where she fell in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter, learned tales of mythical beasts - and discovered that some monsters are real. Something fierce and terrifying has awoken in her. Now she will unleash it into the world.

Reviews

'A fantastically moody, unsettling novel, with a teasing, enigmatic atmosphere entirely its own' - Sarah Waters

'Intensely lyrical and powerfully haunting, Mary is an original take on an origin story of one of Britains most beloved and troubled writers. Sublime storytelling, and Gothic fiction at its very best!' - Susan Stokes-Chapman, author of Pandora

'A bold new framing for questions about where we draw lines: between queerness and heterosexuality, the natural and the unnatural, and the imaginary and the real... Picks up the seeds dropped by Shelleys biographers about Isabella and allows them to bloom into an intense romantic and sexual attachment... The narrative unfolds in hypnotic language steeped in fantasy and allusion' - New Yorker

'Mary imagines, with spell-binding vividness, the forbidden desires and creative inspirations that fuelled Mary Shelleys writing. This is a novel about wild, dissident passion, the profound dislocations of grief, and the intoxication of composition. Eekhouts writing is charged with sensual power: the result is a seductive and unnerving account of Marys most intimate experiences' - Naomi Booth

'A beautiful, hallucinatory dream of a novel, which brings Mary Shelley back to life with a brilliant intensity. This is a marvellous book about desire, and love, and the dark mysteries of the creative act' - J.M. Miro, author of Ordinary Monsters

Author Bio

Anne Eekhout is an award-winning Dutch novelist. Mary; or, the Birth of Frankenstein was inspired by the teenage years of Mary Shelley, and is the first of Annes novels to be published in English. It is currently being translated into 14 languages.