Gothic, fantasy-tinged historical fiction, delving back into the teenage years of Mary Shelley to find the inspiration for Frankenstein

There is a beast inside her, a monster. It wants to scream, it wants to tear things apart.

Scotland, 1812.
When Mary is sent to the countryside for her health, she soon finds herself falling for Isabella, the brooding, grief-stricken eldest daughter of the Baxter family. While the girls explore the local countryside that has harboured stories of witches, ghosts and monsters for centuries, they come across a creature unlike anything they’ve seen before…

Switzerland, 1816.
In the famous year without a summer, Mary is caught between her husband’s ideals of free love, her stepsister’s narcissism and the immense anguish she feels for her recently lost child. While her days
are filled with strife, she spends the intoxicated, laudanum-filled nights sharing ghost stories. As Mary grapples with the inspiration for her famous novel amid the mists of oblivion, a flash of memory takes her back to her time in Scotland, and also to David Booth, the ominous man who took a sinister interest in Mary and Isabella…

Provocative, sensual and dark, Mary; or, the Birth of Frankenstein is a hypnotic ode to the power of the imagination