Gothic, fantasy-tinged historical fiction, delving back into the teenage years of Mary Shelley to find the inspiration for Frankenstein
---Praise for Mary: or, the birth of Frankenstein---
'A bold new framing for questions about where we draw lines: between queerness and heterosexuality, the natural and the unnatural, and the imaginary and the real...' New Yorker
'A touching and convincing portrait of Mary Shelley' Financial Times
'A novel that tiptoes and whispers, woos and caresses like the darkest of fairytales' Joanne Burn, author of The Hemlock Cure
_____A BRAND NEW PAPERBACK EDITION OF THE BEGUILING GOTHIC NOVEL
As darkness falls and storms rage over Lake Geneva, a group of friends gather in a candle-lit-villa.
Among them are eighteen-year-old Mary and her mercurial lover Percy Shelley. As laudanum stirs their feverish imaginations, their host Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story.
Suddenly Mary is transported back to a long, strange summer in the wilds of Scotland, where she fell in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter.
As she remembers, something fierce and terrifying awakes within her. Now she will unleash it into the world.
Industry Reviews
'A fantastically moody, unsettling novel, with a teasing, enigmatic atmosphere entirely its own' - Sarah Waters
'Intensely lyrical and powerfully haunting, Mary is an original take on an origin story of one of Britains most beloved and troubled writers. Sublime storytelling, and Gothic fiction at its very best!' - Susan Stokes-Chapman, author of Pandora
'A bold new framing for questions about where we draw lines: between queerness and heterosexuality, the natural and the unnatural, and the imaginary and the real... Picks up the seeds dropped by Shelleys biographers about Isabella and allows them to bloom into an intense romantic and sexual attachment... The narrative unfolds in hypnotic language steeped in fantasy and allusion' - New Yorker
'Mary imagines, with spell-binding vividness, the forbidden desires and creative inspirations that fuelled Mary Shelleys writing. This is a novel about wild, dissident passion, the profound dislocations of grief, and the intoxication of composition. Eekhouts writing is charged with sensual power: the result is a seductive and unnerving account of Marys 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
