Books Books
ISBN: 9781781724323
Publication date: March 28, 2025
Price: £10.99
ISBN: 9781781724330
Publication date: May 14, 2025
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
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
Jo Mazelis
Jo Mazelis is a novelist, poet, short story writer and photographer living in Swansea. Her first novel Significance (Seren Books, 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 Books, 2016) was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year and long listed for the Edge Hill Prize 2017. ‘Blister & other Stories’ was shortlisted for the International Rubery Award.
“…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
“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
John Goodby
