Mary – Eekhout Anne (2023)

It is the year 1816. Mary Shelley is only eighteen when she visits friends John Polidori and Lord Byron by Lake Geneva with her beloved husband Percy. In the evening, they tell scary stories by the fireplace. A fragment from Mary's past takes her back several years to Scotland, where she experienced a mysterious adventure. This memory becomes the foundation of the world-famous story of Frankenstein. Mary is a hymn to imagination; it is a story about creation and the complex bond between imagination and reality. The book can be read as a bildungsroman about the maturation of a writer and mother, as an intimate narrative about mourning for loved ones, but also as an old-fashioned ghost story or a tale of a double love triangle, echoing the voices of Mary Shelley herself and the Brontë sisters. Mary is simply a perfectly measured blend of genres. Anne Eekhout boldly plays with genre elements that would immediately turn into clichés in the hands of less talented authors. Thanks to the author's gripping storytelling, the young creator of the masterpiece about now the most famous monster of all time comes to life before the reader's eyes.