Love & Other Monsters

All love stories are ghost stories waiting to happen...

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.

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. But they were not alone. Claire Clairmont, Mary's impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal step-sister joined them. That summer 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.

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Love & Other Monsters offers a deep look into the loyalty of siblings, the commitment required to make meaningful art, the dangers of fame, and the creation of monsters--both those on the page and those who walk among us.

Claire Clairmont poured her love, life and razor-sharp wit into the pages of her now-missing journal, a document which everyone present had reason to destroy in order to protect themselves. Now Claire, all but forgotten in her famous sister's shadow, will tell her story.