Clairmont

(Paperback)

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Geneva.

They always come back to it, somehow.

They're the only ones who know what took place there.

'Beautifully written, Clairmont tells the sensuous hidden story of an influential historic woman.' Sara Sheridan, author of The Fair Botanists Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year

1816. A massive volcanic eruption has caused the worst storms that Europe has seen in decades, yet Percy and Mary Shelley have chosen to visit the infamous Lord Byron at his villa on Lake Geneva. It wasn't their idea: Mary's eighteen year old step-sister, Claire Clairmont, insisted.

But the reason for Claire's visit is more pressing than a summer escape with the most famous writers in the world. She's pregnant with Byron's child - a child Byron doesn't want, and scarcely believes is his own.

Claire has the world in her grasp. This trip should have given her everything she ever dreamed of. But within days, her life will be in ruins.

History has all but forgotten her story - but she will not be silenced.

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Beautifully written, Clairmont tells the sensuous hidden story of an influential historic woman. * Sara Sheridan *

Author Bio

Lesley McDowell is a literary critic for The Herald, The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and others. Her first novel was The Picnic (2007). In 2010 she published Between the Sheets: The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers, which was shortlisted for the non-fiction prize in the 2011 Scottish Book Awards. Her second novel Unfashioned Creatures, about Mary Shelley's Scottish childhood friend, was published by Saraband in 2013. She has a PhD on the work of James Joyce, and has won two Creative Scotland writers' bursaries.