Love & Other Monsters: A Novel

In the summer of 1816, Claire Clairmont set in motion a gathering of extraordinary writers. Claire wanted love, importance, and a life touched by greatness. Around her, genius, desire, and arrogance created monsters—and revealed the ones already in the room. Following her national bestseller The Lioness of Boston, Emily Franklin once again brings a woman and her world vividly to life. Theirs was a world that seemed to tilt toward darkness that summer long ago. Frost fell in July. Crops failed. Hunger spread. Mary Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Byron’s physician John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont sheltered through the wild weather. They were young, beautiful, reckless—and watched from across Lake Geneva by a public hungry for celebrity scandal. Out of that season would come Frankenstein, the modern vampire story, and myths of Romantic genius. They were also people stuck in a house: desiring, competing, seducing, betraying, writing, watching one another, hungry for whatever they could use, and turning private damage into art. All the while, Claire kept a journal, recording the vanity, sexual rivalries, sisterly wounds, and secret pregnancy. Then the journal disappeared—and more than one person had reason to want it gone. Decades later, when the lost journal returns, she must face the ghost of the girl she was—the girl who believed the stories men told her, and the still more dangerous story she told herself. Seductive, atmospheric, and haunted, Love & Other Monsters reimagines the human world from which Frankenstein emerged: literary historical fiction alive with art, appetite, celebrity, betrayal, and one young woman’s unforgettable voice. Read more