9781781724323

28/03/25

PB

290 pages

It’s the 1970s, and a strange woman called Jude arrives at a bookshop claiming to know the owner’s wife, Helena. She carries a cache of mysterious documents relating to the life of Mary Shelley’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay. Did Fanny really commit suicide in an inn in Swansea in 1816, as historians thought? The documents suggest not, hinting instead at a faked death and escape from her fraught family life towards independence. But they also imply that the re-born Fanny remained misunderstood, mis-used and rejected, in the manner of Shelley’s Frankenstein monster.

These young women’s lives are precarious; they each struggle to find a place in the world. As the mysteries multiply, the lives of the women begin to intertwine, casting the origin of the letters and the story they tell into doubt. Merging Gothic body-swaps and dark mansions with 70s politics and feminism, The Forger’s Ink is an enthralling and mysterious novel by Jo Mazelis.

“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, author of Widdershins Walk