Mary

'Fantastically moody' SARAH WATERS 'A little masterpiece of suspense-filled gothic fiction... Persuasive and mysterious' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A beautiful, hallucinatory dream of a novel' J.M. MIRO 'Atmospheric... A must-read' i 'Intensely lyrical and powerfully haunting' SUSAN STOKES-CHAPMAN 'Moody and evocative' KIRKUS 'Seductive and unnerving' NAOMI BOOTH __________ 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.

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.