Love & Other Monsters

Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet meets Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice in this intense and propulsive story of love, lust, art and betrayal, based on the important--and forgotten--real life story of eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont, who changed the course of literature forever. All love stories are ghost stories waiting to happen... In the bizarrely cold, scandalous summer of 1816, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her fiery fiancé Percy Shelley, the famously promiscuous Lord Byron, and John Polidori, his sexually tormented personal physician all sheltered together during the storms of what would become known as The Year Without Summer. Those months of desire, betrayal, and creative passion gave the world the works of Frankenstein, the modern vampire legend, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants. But they were not alone. Claire Clairmont, Mary's impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal step-sister was the one who brought them all together. >>>With searing relevance to our here and now--of celebrity worship, climate disaster, of complicated femininity, Love & Other Monsters is a tale of sisters, survival, and the creation of monsters--both those on the page and those who walk among us.