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Book Synopsis“A remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of haunting beauty and profundity.” —
The Washington Post Now in paperback, the bold, genre-defying book that asked: What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein''s monster at all but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother''s grave, and he came to her unbidden? In a riveting mix of fact and poetic license, Laurie Sheck gives us the monster in his own words: recalling how he was made and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him; pondering the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with Mary''s (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates); taking notes on all aspects of human striving--from Gertrude Stein to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own--as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find h