The year is 1816.

Mary Shelley is only eighteen years old when she and her beloved husband Percy visit friends John Polidori and Lord Byron at Lake Geneva. In the evening, they tell each other spooky stories by the fireplace. A fragment of the past takes Mary back a few years, to Scotland, where she experienced a mysterious adventure. This memory will become the basis of the world famous story about Frankenstein.

Mary is a hymn to fantasy, a story of creation and the complex bond between imagination and reality. The book can be read as a bildungsroman about the coming of age of a writer and a mother, as an intimate account of grieving for loved ones, but also as an old-fashioned ghost story or the story of a double love triangle, in which echoes of Mary Shelley herself and the Brontë sisters are heard. In short, Mary is a perfectly dosed mixture of genres.

Anne Eekhout boldly plays with genre elements that would immediately turn into clichés for less gifted authors. Thanks to the author's captivating narration, the young creator of the masterpiece about the now most famous monster of all time comes to life before the eyes of the reader.