Overview

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.

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9781782278979

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Reviews

'A fantastically moody, unsettling novel, with a teasing, enigmatic atmosphere entirely its own' - Sarah Waters 'Mary imagines, with spell-binding vividness, the forbidden desires and creative inspirations that fuelled Mary Shelley's writing. This is a novel about wild, dissident passion, the profound dislocations of grief, and the intoxication of composition. Eekhout's writing is charged with sensual power: the result is a seductive and unnerving account of Mary's 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 '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 'Like reading a laudanum dream... Both the language and narrative of Anne Eekhout's book have a hallucinatory quality that encourages us to question everything and doubt everyone. The sense of danger, of violence at the hands of man or monsters, is imbued in every sentence. It brought me to a world where the old certainties of society, convention and religion have been stripped away, and where women like Mary Shelley, though unsure of her steps and uncertain of her fellows, found the courage to live and create' - Annie Garthwaite

Author Information

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 both an imaginative exploration of the great writer's psyche and an unsettling meditation on the monsters that inhabit our minds. It is the first of Anne's novels to be published in English and is also currently being translated into 14 languages.

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