Anne Eekhout

A novel of innocence, young love, and gothic mystery that is a sapphic reimagining of Mary Shelley’s life, and a wonderfully imaginative exploration of the roots of her literary masterpiece, Frankenstein. Europe, 1816. A volcanic eruption in Indonesia envelopes the continent in ash and clouds. Amid the gloom of this “year without summer,” eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley, her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley, their baby boy William, and her stepsister Claire visit Lord Byron and his companion John Polidori at Lake Geneva. The friends spend rainy wine-soaked evenings around the fireplace, exchanging ghost stories. One night, Byron issues a challenge to determine which of them can write the best horror story of their own. Musing over her tale, Mary is reminded of another summer, when she was fourteen. A guest of the Baxter family, Mary arrives in Dundee, Scotland, and quickly falls into a warm friendship with young Isabella Baxter. The girls spend hours together wandering through fields and forests, conjuring stories about mythical Scottish creatures, ghosts, and monsters which roam the lowlands. One day, while deep in the woods, they come upon a real monster, an encounter that leaves them questioning whether the fabulous creatures of their stories are more than just figments of the imagination. As their bond deepens from their secret experience, Mary and Isabella’s feelings for each other intensify. But the girls do not know that someone has been watching them—the charismatic and vaguely sinister Mr. Booth, Isabella's older brother-in-law, another kind of monster who wears the face of a man. That memory inspires Mary’s tale—a story that will become one of the most original, thrilling, and influential works of literature ever written. In this beautiful blend of fact and fiction, wonderfully atmospheric and pulsing with emotion, Anne Eekhout brings the legendary writer to life with verve and great imagination. Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

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