Mairi Kidd on Poor Creatures

Mairi Kidd on Poor Creatures

Mairi Kidd's admirable literary career includes three books celebrating fierce historical women like Warriors and Witches and Damn Rebel Bitches, as well as works of historical fiction that bring 19th century Scotland alive, like The Specimens, a retelling of the Burke & Hare tale. She returns with Poor Creatures, a bold exploration of the many monsters in young Mary Shelley's life.

Dundee, 1812. Isabel Baxter awaits the arrival of Mary Godwin, a girl of fierce intelligence and grand passions, sent north to recover from a mysterious ailment. The Baxter family home, nestled in woodland by the river Tay, seems the perfect retreat. But The Cottage is a place of secrets, and Mary is no ordinary guest.

As the girls grow closer, their friendship becomes all-consuming, haunted by memory, fuelled by feverish creativity, and shadowed by something monstrous.

Inspired by true events, this is an immersive reimagining of the young Mary Shelley before she became the author of Frankenstein. A story of girlhood, obsession, and the birth of a literary legend.

Mairi Kidd graduated with a First in Celtic Studies from the University of Edinburgh and has worked in books ever since. Her novel The Specimens - a retelling of the 1828 crimes of Burke and Hare - was Waterstones Scottish Book of the Month and the short stories from her collection We Are All Witches formed the basis for the award-winning 'Heal and Harrow' project.

She lives by the sea in Edinburgh with her illustrator husband and their rescue cat.