Love & Other Monsters - by Emily Franklin (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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 Shelly, her fiery fiance Percy Shelly, the famously promiscuous Lord Byron, and 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. When a global climate catastrophe wreaks havoc, Claire tries to separate from Mary and Percy Shelley, finding strength in her individuality. Yet Claire is also caught up in romance, fueled by Jane Austen's novels, as she pursues Lord Byron whose celebrity status - and the paparazzi lurking nearby - threatens them all. As the connections between each member of the group grow more complex, Claire tries to find purpose in a world built by and created for men. While those around her write what will become some of the most famous works in literature, Claire must ask herself just how far she will go for love. With dramatic weather threatening the food supply, Claire proves her worth by learning to forage for food, all the while documenting everything in her journal. As the summer progresses, passions rise and secrets refuse to stay hidden in Claire's pages. Love and Other Monsters offers a deep look into the loyalty of siblings, the commitment required to make meaningful art, the role 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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, who changed the course of literature forever.

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

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. Those months 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. But they were not alone. Claire Clairmont, Mary's impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal step-sister was the one who brought them all together.

Earlier that year, Claire, herself a writer, had grown weary of living in Mary's shadow. Desperate to free herself from the uncomfortable role she played in her sister's marriage, Claire wrote to celebrity Lord Byron, who--to her amazement--responded. And when their ardent affair ended, Claire was determined not to be forgotten and Claire convinced Mary and Percy to follow him to Switzerland.

As a global climate catastrophe wreaks havoc, Claire tries to separate from Mary and Percy Shelley, finding strength in her individuality. Yet Claire is also caught up in romance, fueled by Jane Austen's novels, as she pursues Lord Byron whose celebrity status--and the paparazzi lurking nearby--threatens them all. As the connections between each member of the group grow more complex, Claire tries to find purpose in a world built by and created for men.

While those around her write what became some of literature's most famous works, Claire documents everything in her journal, asking herself just how far she will go for love. With climate disaster threatening the food supply, Claire proves her worth learning to forage for food. The real Claire Clairmont poured her love, life, and razor-sharp wit into her journals, yet her journal from the summer of 1816 is curiously missing. Claire, all but forgotten in her famous sister's shadow, will now tell her story, trying to answer the questions of who took that journal--and why.

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

Review Quotes

"Love & Other Monsters is the reason to read historical fiction: a completely immersive voice and experience, transporting you out of your own time and place, landing you somewhere else entirely -- where candlelight, the sublime Alpine landscape, and after-dinner debates of poetry and human nature all live beside the all-too-familiar feelings of longing, fear, and struggling to find one's place in life. Every time I picked up this book I felt like I was knocking on a door to another world."

--Ben Shattuck, author of The History of Sound

"A rare literary achievement with prose as beautiful as a painting and a story that is propulsively page-turning. Claire Clairmont (stepsister to Mary Shelley) must forage for her sense of self in the summer of 1816, as she is beset and baffled by love and betrayal, genius and cruelty, passion and creativity, while living at the shores of Lake Geneva with writers as brilliant and moody as the descending storms. What was her role (whether forgotten or erased) in the lives and artistic development of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and her stepsister Mary's creation of Frankenstein? I could not put down this thought-provoking, poignant, well-researched yet wholly original novel."

--Jennifer Rosner, author of Once We Were Home

"A gorgeous tour de force. Magnificent and fiercely told, Love & Other Monsters is at once a literary page-turner and a spellbinding coming-of-age novel. With her masterful gift for storytelling, Emily Franklin breathes life into an untold history that feels entirely relevant to our world today. With electric insight, she maps the shifting tensions between creativity and passion; artistic ambition, familial betrayal, and the risks of desire."

--Dawn Tripp, author of Jackie

"With perfect tone and remarkable skill, Emily Franklin brings to life the core writers of the Romantic literary movement while revealing the travails of one young woman who was at the center of it all but whose presence was erased. While others bore the fruits of fame, Claire Clairmont had no choice but to fall into the role so common for women of her time and ours: that of being pleasing, amiable, and invisible. With Franklin's gorgeous narrative full of wisdom about womanhood and art, the talents and hopes of Clairmont finally get the attention they deserve."

--Marjan Kamali, author of The Lion Women of Tehran

"Love & Other Monsters is an intricate and moving story about power dynamics, sisters, celebrity, lust, and the importance of art and storytelling. Claire Clairmont is a vibrant heroine and I'm so glad Emily Franklin brought her into my life. I loved this book."

--Annie Hartnett, author of The Road to Tender Hearts

"Let us each write a ghost story, Byron commands in the early pages of Emily Franklin's Love & Other Monsters, a thoroughly researched and intimately written story of sisterhood, celebrity, and obsession. While her more famous stepsister pens Frankenstein, writing alongside her already-married fiancé Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont records the events of their wintery and wild summer on the shores of Lake Geneva. She explores the monstrous drive toward creativity in writers who may themselves be monsters, and the real life ghosts of those we quietly love, children we lose, and parts of ourselves that never get to bloom."

--Meg Waite Clayton, author of Typewriter Beach

"Love & Other Monsters is at once a portrait of a passionate woman hemmed in by her time and place and an encounter with perennial questions: how is the self formed in relationship to others? What must we sacrifice for love? For art? Emily Franklin has written a moving and fascinating book."

--Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika

"Emily Franklin's novel is as thrilling and tempestuous as the storm-battered summer that inspired Frankenstein. With prose that is both elegant and urgent, she illuminates the tangled desires, rivalries, and creative fervor of these legendary figures -- not as icons, but as flawed, yearning humans. Like my favorite Chekhov plays, Love & Other Monsters gives us a collision of restless artists, unrequited loves, and the longing for purpose that both fuels and frustrates creation. Franklin writes with a piercing compassion for her characters, revealing the comedy, tragedy and absurdity in their compulsive drive to connect. In Claire Clairmont's searching voice, we feel the pull between love and delusion, duty and independence, art and survival. This is a rich, haunting novel about the monsters among us, the ones we create, and the ones we harbor within ourselves."

--David Lindsay-Abaire, Pulitzer/Tony Award Winning playwright

"In Love & Other Monsters, Emily Franklin masterfully reveals how everyday decisions can morph into monsters. Claire Clairmont's turning points are skillfully woven by Franklin from the textures of the quotidian--the baby's wail, the unseasonably chill air, the soreness after passion, the giddy pleasure of a secret, the sting of a sibling's insufficient love, even the grit of home-made toothpaste. I was hooked from the first witticism on the first page, and readers will find much to cheer, groan, rage, weep, and laugh about in this captivating story of lust, betrayal, celebrity, and silences only broken centuries later."

--Maria Pinto, author of Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless

"Fans of historical fiction will be drawn to this new novel--it's the Frankenstein origin story! And the sexy vampire origin story!--that steadily reveals an ugliness beneath the surface of the famous summer of 1816. The Gothic intrigue, intense desire, feminist reckoning in Franklin's thrilling novel makes the perfect book club pick and will appeal to fans of Rebecca Makkai."
--Mary Cotton, Newtonville Books

"With searing relevance to our here and now--of celebrity worship, climate disaster, of complicated femininity--Love & Other Monsters is a tale of sisters, survival, what it takes to make art, and the price of loving (and being loved by) brilliant, beautiful men who may also be monsters."

--Nick Petrulakis, Lovestruck Books

"What Emily Franklin achieves with her forthcoming novel Love & Other Monsters is nothing short of stunning as she creates a richly textured world of her own imagination, yet expertly grounds this flawlessly in the historical record. Without question, Love & Other Monsters deserves to be THE book of 2026."

--Elizabeth Lane, Partners Village Store and Kitchen

"Love & Other Monsters is one of those books that you don't want to stop reading but you also can't wait to share it with the world at the same time. It inspired in me a long, slow, internal gasp. Not of shock but of awe at the emotional insight and understanding of human complexities that Franklin has so exquisitely expressed in these pages. I guarantee this novel will grip you from the first page to the last with Claire's intriguing perspective, a piece of history largely untouched in literature, and plenty of thrilling scandals ensuing with the likes of Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. Once again, Emily Franklin does not disappoint!"

--Rae Titcomb, Titcomb's Bookshop

About the Author

Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of more than twenty books including a poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, read aloud on National Public Radio, named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and longlisted for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award. Her novel The Lioness of Boston, based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, is in its tenth printing. Love & Other Monsters, historical fiction told from the perspective of Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's forgotten stepsister who changed the course of literature forever, will be published in April 2026.