Emily Franklin

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet meets Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice in this new historical fiction. Love & Other Monsters is an intense and propulsive story of love, lust, art and betrayal, based on the important—and forgotten—real life of eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont.

All love stories are ghost stories waiting to happen…In the bizarrely cold, scandalous summer of 1816, a real group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly, her fiery fiancé 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…read more

Boston Globe Bestseller

“Brings Isabella Stewart Gardner fully, intimately alive—irrepressible and avid for life. In this richly compelling novel, Emily Franklin beautifully conjures this extraordinary woman and her world.” —Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children“A captivating story of a significant woman in Boston’s history who left that city a cultural legacy to last the ages. This beautiful novel will appeal to those who love masterful historical fiction, literary fiction, and stories of triumphant women who leave an indelible mark.”
—New York Journal of Books