The Forger's Ink

It's the 1970s, and a mysterious woman has a cache of letters which claim to tell the story of the death of Fanny Imlay, half-sister of Mary Shelley and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Did Fanny really commit suicide in an inn in Swansea in 1816, as historians thought? The letters instead suggest a faked death and an escape from Fanny's fraught family life. It could have been an independence of which Fanny's mother would have been proud. But the letters also suggest the re-born Fanny remained misunderstood, mis-used and rejected, in the manner of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster. The women's intertwining narratives begin to reflect each other as the mysteries multiply and resolve. Gothic body-swaps, dark mansions and unexpected deaths merge with 70s politics and feminism in this tour-de-force by Jerwood Prize-winning author Jo Mazelis. "The Wollstonecraft-Shelley story is a founding myth in Gothic literature; Jo Mazelis tears it to shreds and reassembles it, amid the thick sea mists of south Wales, with Cymbeline and the Manson girls among her dramatic sources." - Geoff Sawers, author of Widdershins Walk