Mary

A fantastically moody, unsettling novel, with a teasing, enigmatic atmosphere entirely its own - Sarah Waters

Intensely lyrical and powerfully haunting, Mary is an original take on an origin story of one of Britain's most beloved and troubled writers. Sublime storytelling, and Gothic fiction at its very best! - Susan Stokes-Chapman, author of Pandora

A bold new framing for questions about where we draw lines: between queerness and heterosexuality, the natural and the unnatural, and the imaginary and the real... Picks up the seeds dropped by Shelley's biographers about Isabella and allows them to bloom into an intense romantic and sexual attachment... The narrative unfolds in hypnotic language steeped in fantasy and allusion - New Yorker

Mary imagines, with spell-binding vividness, the forbidden desires and creative inspirations that fuelled Mary Shelley's writing. This is a novel about wild, dissident passion, the profound dislocations of grief, and the intoxication of composition. Eekhout's writing is charged with sensual power: the result is a seductive and unnerving account of Mary's most intimate experiences - Naomi Booth

A beautiful, hallucinatory dream of a novel, which brings Mary Shelley back to life with a brilliant intensity. This is a marvellous book about desire, and love, and the dark mysteries of the creative act - J.M. Miro, author of Ordinary Monsters

A novel that tiptoes and whispers, woos and caresses like the darkest of fairytales. Laudanum and love, wild imaginations and haunted hearts; I was bewitched by this profound and pleasurable imagining of Mary Shelley and the birth of Frankenstein - Joanne Burn, author of The Hemlock Cure

Like reading a laudanum dream... Both the language and narrative of Anne Eekhout's book have a hallucinatory quality that encourages us to question everything and doubt everyone. The sense of danger, of violence at the hands of man or monsters, is imbued in every sentence. It brought me to a world where the old certainties of society, convention and religion have been stripped away, and where women like Mary Shelley, though unsure of her steps and uncertain of her fellows, found the courage to live and create - Annie Garthwaite

Rich, intricate and beguiling, this is a novel of enormous insight, great heart and incredible skill. Mary has so much to tell us about grief, fear, love and imagination. I will return to it often - Nell Stevens, author of Briefly, A Delicious Life