The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein » (Unabridged)

Peter Ackroyd is a master of the historical novel: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde won the Somerset Maugham Award; Hawksmoor was awarded both the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Prize; and Chatterton was short-listed for the Booker Prize. His most recent historical novel is The Fall of Troy. He is also the author of London: The Biography, Shakespeare: The Biography, Thames: The Biography, and Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series.

A surprising portrait of Peter Paul Rubens' double life as a secret agent who negotiated a peace between superpowers.

When two nineteenth-century Oxford students—Victor Frankenstein, a serious researcher, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—form an unlikely friendship, the result is a tour de force that could only come from one of the world's most accomplished and prolific authors.

This haunting and atmospheric novel opens with a heated discussion, as Shelley challenges the conventionally religious Frankenstein to consider his atheistic notions of creation and life. Afterward, these concepts become an obsession for the young scientist. As Victor begins conducting anatomical experiments to reanimate the dead, he at first uses corpses supplied by the coroner. But these specimens prove imperfect for Victor's purposes. Moving his makeshift laboratory to a deserted pottery factory in Limehouse, he makes contact with the Doomsday men—the...

The Barnes & Noble Review

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, written when the author was 19 and published in 1818, was so ponderous a departure from traditional Victorian fare that it shocked not just the nerves but also the sensibilities of staid British society. The outrageous tale of a monster sprung from inanimate matter -- and capable of quoting Milton and Goethe -- who then turns against his creator, heralded a brave new voice.