Emily Franklin

bestselling author and poet

Ilsa Brink

Lessons in Love

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It’s Love’s final year at Hadley Hall—has she learned all she needs to get by?

Who said senior year was simple? No longer a day student at Hadley Hall, Love Bukowski’s about to move into the dorms—with none other than her archenemy, Lindsay Parrish. Love must deal with Lindsay’s rules as head monitor; her handsome boyfriend, Charlie, returning to Harvard; and her ex Jacob giving her the cold shoulder. On the bright side, Love has a new look, a new feel, and best of all, she’s going to be reunited with her mom and half-sister, Sadie. The boys of summer (or fall) may come and go, but Love’s faith in family and her passion for writing stay steady. It may be the end of high school, but there will always be lessons in Love . . .

Reviews

“Often funny, sometimes wise, a good read.” —Kirkus Reviews on The Principles of Love

“Funny and poignant.” —Elle Girl

“Love Bukowski is the perfect teen heroine, the girl you wish had been your best friend in high school. Love tells all in a voice that is alternately funny and heartwrenching.” —Sarah Dessen, bestselling author of Just Listen

Love & Other Monsters

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Love & Other Monsters historical fiction for readers who love Jane Austen Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein Percy Shelley Byron and gothic fiction

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Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet meets Jane Austen in this historical fiction based on the life of daring eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont who in 1816 changed the course of literature forever. But then—unlike her stepsister Mary Shelley—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 fiancé 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.

Praise & Reviews

“Delicious, spot-on…The prose is lush and Franklin’s descriptions evoke the tenor of the Romantics’ writing. Her painstaking attention to detail and carefully drawn characters will delight fans of British period dramas and readers of historical fiction.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review

“Claire Clairmont—free-thinker, ‘foraging wild woman,’ lover of Lord Byron and stepsister of Mary Shelley—was present at but erased from the history of a mythic moment in English literature. The author’s lyrical prose…is a devoted restoration of a figure whose presence and contribution were obscured by men’s—and Mary’s—interventions. A satisfying…act of literary reanimation….”
—Kirkus

“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

“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

“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

“Emily Franklin’s Love & Other Monsters is 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

“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, New York Times bestselling author of The Lion Women of Tehran

“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 and Tony Award Winning Playwright

“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, internationally bestselling author of Typewriter Beach 

“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 

From Booksellers:

“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, General Manager & Events Coordinator, Titcomb’s Bookshop, East Sandwich, MA

“Fans of historical fiction will be drawn to this new historical novel—it’s the Frankenstein origin story! And the sexy vampire origin story!—that steadily reveals an ugliness beneath the surface of this famous summer. The gothic intrigue, intense desire, and feminist reckoning in this thrilling new book will appeal to fans of Sarah Waters and Rebecca Makkai, anyone who wants to know what it takes to make art, and readers looking for something to really sink their teeth into. This can’t come out soon enough for me!” —Mary Cotton, Owner of Newtonville Books