Emily Franklin presents Love & Other Monsters

About this event

Bestselling author Emily Franklin visits Gibson's Bookstore to share her latest novel, Love & Other Monsters. From the Bestselling Author of The Lioness of Boston comes Love & Other Monsters, a story of love, lust, art, and betrayal set in the scandalous summer of 1816 when 18-year-old Claire Clairmont—Mary Shelley’s stepsister and Lord Byron’s lover—changed the course of literature forever... and then was erased. Emily Franklin once again brings a woman and her world vividly to life. 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 who changed the course of literature forever. 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. About the Author 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 work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, among many other places, as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. She grew up half in the UK and half in Boston where she lives now with her spouse and four children. Her latest novel, Love & Other Monsters, is the untold origin story of Frankenstein told from the perspective Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister and Lord Byron’s lover, who changed the course of literature forever—and then was erased.

Who

• Emily FranklinAuthor
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The book

• Love and Other MonstersEmily FranklinBuy on Bookshop.org

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More by Emily Franklin

• 
  The Lioness of BostonEmily FranklinBuy on Bookshop.org

Bookshop.org funds independent bookstores. Buying through these links can earn Find Local a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Venue

Gibson's Bookstore

45 S Main St, Concord, NH 03301

Venue website

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