A young scientist unlocks the secret of life — and wishes he hadn't. Victor Frankenstein, brilliant and reckless, stitches together a creature from charnel houses and sparks it into being, then flees in horror from what he has made. But the creature is not merely a monster. He is articulate, sensitive, and devastatingly alone, cast into a world that recoils from his very existence. As creator and creation pursue each other across Europe and into the Arctic wastes, Shelley asks the questions that haunt every age of discovery: What do we owe the life we bring into being? Can ambition divorced from responsibility ever end in anything but ruin? Written when Shelley was just eighteen, this electrifying novel invented science fiction and has never stopped being relevant. It is a story about the intoxication of genius, the agony of abandonment, and the terrible cost of playing God.