Emily Franklin's ravishing Regency drama, Love & Other Monsters, is inspired by real-life literary luminaries of the Romantic period and the Englishwoman whose ghost lingers in some of their most consequential works. Resurrecting the talented aspiring writer Claire Clairmont from the dusty pages of historical archives, Franklin (The Lioness of Boston) delivers a sexually charged saga of thwarted love set on the banks of Switzerland's Lake Geneva.
The novel opens in 1879; Claire is an octogenarian taking a backward glance through the pages of a journal she penned during 1816 as a vivacious teenager on the brink of life. She finds adventure in the arms of Lord Byron, a celebrity poet and regular fixture in the gossip pages. That summer, Claire decamps from London to Villa Diodati, Byron's Swiss vacation home, with her stepsister, Mary, and Mary's beau, Percy Shelley.
Franklin's storytelling is saturated with the lush atmosphere and mystical undertones of a torrentially wet summer. Mary hunkers down to create her masterpiece, Frankenstein, and the men to write their poetry. Tired of Byron's growing cruelty and Mary's intellectual condescension, Claire turns in on herself like the "cold-worn poppies" in the garden. When relations with Byron take a sharp downward turn, resourceful Claire must salvage what she can of her power over him by grafting her own secret literary legacy onto his.
Blending history with heart-quickening fiction, Love & Other Monsters introduces readers to an obscure, unashamedly sensual writer consistently underestimated for the ambitions that eventually render her immortal on the page. --Shahina Piyarali