Love & Other Monsters
by Emily Franklin
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Apr 07 2026 | Archive Date Apr 07 2026
Talking about this book? Use #LoveOtherMonsters #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
All love stories are ghost stories waiting to happen…
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 of eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont.
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. 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 & Other Monsters offers a deep look into the loyalty of siblings, the commitment required to make meaningful art, the dangers 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.
Advance Praise
“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
“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 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
“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
Bookseller praise:
“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, 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, 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
Marketing Plan
New historical fiction novel by the author of Lioness of Boston (4/2023 hardcover; 3/2024 paperback)—65,000 copies sold to date.
Perennial interest in the summer that gave the world Frankenstein as well as Vampyr, the first vampire story.
Promotions at retail trade shows
National publicity
GoodReads campaign
Nationwide tour
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781567928556 |
| PRICE | $30.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 472 |
