Description:
During The Year Without Summer, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her fiancé Percy Shelley, the promiscuous Lord Byron, and John Polidori, his sexually tormented physician. At the group's center was Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister. Those months of desire, betrayal, and creative passion gave the world the works of Frankenstein, the modern vampire, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants. In this story of love, lust, art, and betrayal, Claire tells her story. Claire--herself a writer--is desperate to free herself from the role she plays in her sister's marriage. Claire begins an affair with Lord Byron and convinces Mary and Shelley to follow him to Switzerland. With the threat of paparazzi, Claire's intimate connection to each member of the celebrity group grows more complex. Her journey of self-discovery leads her to document everyone's secrets in her journal. The real Claire Clairmont poured her love, life, and razor-sharp wit into her pages, yet her journal is curiously missing. Love & Other Monsters is the untold origin story of Frankenstein, a feminist reckoning of sisters, survival, and the creation of monsters.
Brief description: Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of more than twenty books including a poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, read aloud on National Public Radio, named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and longlisted for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award. Her novel The Lioness of Boston, based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, is in its tenth printing. Love & Other Monsters, historical fiction told from the perspective of Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's forgotten stepsister who changed the course of literature forever, will be published in April 2026.