The Monster's Wife — Kate Horsley

Shortlisted for the Saltire Society SCOTTISH FIRST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014

Following in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly, THE MONSTER'S WIFE is a literary gothic that re-envisions the classic Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a Bride for his monster. To a tiny island in Orkney, peopled by a devout community of twenty, comes Victor Frankenstein, driven there by a Devil's bargain: to make a wife for the Creature who is stalking him across Europe.

In this darkly-wrought answer to Frankenstein, we hear the untold tale of the monster's wife through the perspective of the doctor's housemaid. Oona works below stairs with her best friend May, washing the doctor's linens and keeping the fires lit at the Big House. An orphan whose only legacy is the illness that killed her mother, Oona knows she is doomed. But she is also thirsty for knowledge, determined to know life fully before it slips away. As tensions heighten between Victor and the islanders, Oona becomes the doctor's trusted accomplice, aiding in secret experiments and seeing horrors she sometimes wishes to forget. When May disappears, Oona must face up to growing suspicions about the enigmatic employer to whom she has grown close - but the truth is darker than anything she could imagine.