Emily Franklin presents Love & Other Monsters

In the stormy, scandalous summer of 1816, daring eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont changed the course of literature forever. But then--unlike her stepsister Mary Shelley--she was forgotten, until now.

During the dangerous storms of The Year Without Summer, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her fiery fianc Percy Shelley, the famously promiscuous Lord Byron, and John Polidori, his sexually tormented personal physician. At the group's center was Claire Clairmont, Mary's impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal stepsister.

Those months of desire, betrayal, and creative passion gave the world the works of Frankenstein, the modern vampire, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants. In this intense and propulsive story of love, lust, art and betrayal Claire tells her story, trying to solve the mystery of why she was all but erased from history.

Claire--herself a writer--is desperate to free herself from the uncomfortable role she plays in her sister's marriage in London. Fueled by Jane Austin's romantic novels, and believing love offers freedom, Claire begins an affair with celebrity Lord Byron and convinces Mary and Shelley to follow him to Switzerland.

With the threat of paparazzi lurking nearby, Claire's intimate connection to each member of the celebrity group grows more complex. Her journey of self-discovery leads her to document everyone's secrets in her journal, and when climate disaster causes food shortages, Claire learns to forage, determined to prove her worth in a world built by and created for men.

The real Claire Clairmont poured her love, life, and razor-sharp wit into her pages, yet her journal from 1816 is curiously missing and each member of the group had a reason to take it.

With searing relevance to our here and now--of celebrity worship, climate disaster, of complicated femininity, Love & Other Monsters is the untold origin story of Frankenstein, a feminist reckoning of sisters, survival, and the creation of monsters--both those on the page and those who walk among us.

Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of twenty-five books including The Lioness of Boston, based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, now in its eleventh printing and recently featured as a clue on Jeopardy! Her poetry, fiction, essays, and photos have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, among many other places, as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio, long-listed for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her next novel Love & Other Monsters, historical fiction based on the forgotten—but important life of Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister who was integral in the creation of Frankenstein, will be published in April 2026.

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Host or Publisher Susan Norton