Emma recommends... Mary : or, The Birth of Frankenstein - Anne Eekhout

Emma recommends... Deeply unsettling but beautifully realised, this is a reimagining of the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that delivers a modern Gothic tale every bit as terrifying and gripping as the novel itself! Full of dark hints and settings in which emotions and imaginations are fired first by adolescent longing and later by laudanum, this is a brilliant take on the origins of one of literature's most mythologised monsters. Doesn't hurt that it is also a gorgeous thing to behold!

---

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.