Love, Sex, and Frankenstein: A Novel [Hardcover]

An evocative, haunting retelling of the summer that should have broken Mary Shelley, but instead inspired her to write her masterpiece.

ANew York Times Book ReviewEditor's Choice

Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva, 1816: the dark summer that birthed a monster.

Eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley has fled London with her lover, Percy Shelley, and her sister, Claire. Tormented by Shelley’s betrayals, haunted by the loss of their baby, and suspicious of her sister’s intentions, Mary seeks a refuge.

But Lord Byron’s villa, lying under ominous, ash-shrouded skies, feels more like a trap. When Byron suggests each guest write a supernatural tale, Mary is as drawn to the challenge as she is, unexpectedly, to Byron himself.

And so an idea begins to form in her mind . . . It spills out of her in thick, black ink. A thing given life by her imagination.

Day and night, it possesses her. Her heart, her desires.

But is she in control, or is it?

In this hauntingly evocative feminist retelling, Caroline Lea delves into the female rage, creative madness and steamy scandal that bore the world's most famous work of gothic fiction.Caroline Lea is the critically acclaimed author of The Glass Woman,The Metal Heart, and Prize Women. She lives in England."By slicing up biographical details and sewing them back together with patches of her imagination, Lea has created a vibrant vision of Mary Shelley as a young feminist channeling her anger and finding her voice. You couldn’t have extracted me from these pages with the jaws of life. Every vision is sepulchral or arousing, every sound is unnerving. One doesn’t read this novel so much as suffer it like a fever. What’s most thrilling, though, is the way Lea captures the evolution of Mary’s vibrant mind. With all the terror and energy of a mad scientist wielding the forlSÊ