Author(s): Anne Eekhout

New Hardbacks

Gothic, fantasy-tinged historical fiction, delving back into the teenage years of Mary Shelley to find the inspiration for Frankenstein

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

'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

'A novel that tiptoes and whispers, woos and caresses like the darkest of fairytales. Laudanum and love, wild imaginations and haunted hearts; I was bewitched by this profound and pleasurable imagining of Mary Shelley and the birth of Frankenstein' Joanne Burn, author of The Hemlock Cure

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There 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.