It’s the 1970s, and a mysterious woman has a cache of letters to sell. They claim to tell the story of the death of Fanny Imlay, half-sister of Mary Shelley and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Did Fanny really commit suicide in an inn in Swansea in 1816, as historians thought? The letters instead suggest a faked death and an escape from Fanny’s fraught family life. It could have been an independence of which Fanny’s mother would have been proud. But the letters also suggest the re-born Fanny remained misunderstood, mis-used and rejected, in the manner of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster.
The women’s intertwining narratives begin to reflect each other as the mysteries multiply and resolve. Gothic body-swaps, dark mansions and unexpected deaths merge with 70s politics and feminism in this tour-de-force by Jerwood Prize-winning author Jo Mazelis.
About the Author :
Jo Mazelis’s first novel ‘Significance’ (Seren, 2014) won the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Her collection of stories, ‘Diving Girls’, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth ‘Best First Book’ and Wales Book of the Year. Her second book, ‘Circle Games’, was long-listed for Wales Book of the Year. Her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, published in various anthologies and magazines, and translated into Danish. Her third collection of stories ‘Ritual, 1969’ (Seren, 2016) was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year and longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2017. ‘Blister & other Stories’ was shortlisted for the International Rubery Award.
Review :
"The Wollstonecraft-Shelley story is a founding myth in Gothic literature; Jo Mazelis tears it to shreds and reassembles it, amid the thick sea mists of south Wales, with Cymbeline and the Manson girls among her dramatic sources." - Geoff Sawers
"...a terrific, witty, multi-layered, ambitious novel - tender, provoking, narratively enthralling, a history and a mystery; and, as always with Jo's work, lucidly intelligent." - John Goodby
"A beautiful and haunting novel, Jo Mazelis' The Forger's Ink brings elegant gothic to west Wales... Mazelis' writing is remarkably skilful... Hope is a particularly powerful tool in Mazelis' work, with even the bleaker aspects of the narrative leading us to question where hope is found and if all hope is really lost. A truly beautiful and creative Gothic narrative." - Buzz Magazine
"...an intriguing and intelligent re-examination of Frankenstein through the battered and bartered figure of Fanny: 'life destroys life in order to live'. There is much ambition here... At base, this is a book that takes as its mission the reanimation and empathic disinterment of a neglected and forgotten and dismayingly ruined life." - Nation.Cymru
