Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

'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.