Love & Other Monsters

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.

INDIE PRESS FICTION BESTSELLER

“Ravishing....Blending history with heart-quickening fiction.” —Shelf Awareness

“Titillating, scintillating...a burning tale of badly behaving literary luminaries that drips with juicy details.” —BookPage

“Luminous and transportive....as singular and lightning charged as the moment that inspired Frankenstein itself.” —Historical Novel Society, Editor’s Choice

“Delicious, spot-on...will delight fans of British period dramas and readers of historical fiction.” —Library Journal, Starred Review

“Will appeal to fans of Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult.” —Booklist, Starred Review

“A fresh perspective on a famous moment in literary history.” —Publishers Weekly

“Transfixing...the book’s sensual, immersive prose balances Claire’s yearnings and frustrations with the brilliance, insecurities, and quirks of her companions.” —Foreword Reviews, Editor’s Choice

“Love & Other Monsters is the reason to read historical fiction: a completely immersive voice and experience, transporting you out of your own time and place, landing you somewhere else entirely. Every time I picked up this book I felt like I was knocking on a door to another world.” —Ben Shattuck, author of The History of Sound

“The author’s lyrical prose...is a devoted restoration of a figure whose presence and contribution were obscured by men’s—and Mary’s—interventions. A satisfying...act of literary reanimation.” —Kirkus

“A rare literary achievement with prose as beautiful as a painting and a story that is propulsively page-turning. I could not put down this thought-provoking, poignant, well-researched yet wholly original novel.” —Jennifer Rosner, author of Once We Were Home

“A gorgeous tour de force. Magnificent and fiercely told. Emily Franklin breathes life into an untold history that feels entirely relevant to our world today.” —Dawn Tripp, author of Jackie

“With Franklin’s gorgeous narrative full of wisdom about womanhood and art, the talents and hopes of Clairmont finally get the attention they deserve.” —Marjan Kamali, author of The Lion Women of Tehran

“Thrilling….Franklin has written a book about a girl on a precipice, and the reader tumbles over it with her.” —Karen E. Bender, author of The Words of Dr. L

“Told with meticulous and immersive historical detail, Franklin delivers a narrative that is both sweeping and intimate, with themes that are all too relevant today.” —Jane Healey, author of The Women of Arlington Hall

“Love & Other Monsters is an intricate and moving story about power dynamics, sisters, celebrity, lust, and the importance of art and storytelling. I loved this book.” —Annie Hartnett, author of The Road to Tender Hearts

“Love & Other Monsters is at once a portrait of a passionate woman hemmed in by her time and place and an encounter with perennial questions: how is the self formed in relationship to others? What must we sacrifice for love? For art? Emily Franklin has written a moving and fascinating book.” —Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika

“Emily Franklin’s novel is as thrilling and tempestuous as the storm-battered summer that inspired Frankenstein. This is a rich, haunting novel about the monsters among us, the ones we create, and the ones we harbor within ourselves.” —David Lindsay-Abaire, Pulitzer/Tony Award Winning playwright

“In Love & Other Monsters, Emily Franklin masterfully reveals how everyday decisions can morph into monsters. I was hooked from the first witticism on the first page, and readers will find much to cheer, groan, rage, weep, and laugh about in this captivating story.” —Maria Pinto, author of Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless

“A thoroughly researched and intimately written story of sisterhood, celebrity, and obsession.” —Meg Waite Clayton, author of Typewriter Beach