Shortlisted for the Saltire Society SCOTTISH FIRST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014Following in the tradition of Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea and Valerie Martins Mary Reilly THE MONSTERS WIFE is a literary gothic that reenvisions the classic Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a Bride for his monster. To a tiny island in Orkney peopled by a devout community of twenty comes Victor Frankenstein driven there by a Devils bargain to make a wife for the Creature who is stalking him across Europe.In this darklywrought answer to Frankenstein we hear the untold tale of the monsters wife through the perspective of the doctors housemaid. Oona works below stairs with her best friend May washing the doctors linens and keeping the fires lit at the Big House. An orphan whose only legacy is the illness that killed her mother Oona knows she is doomed. But she is also thirsty for knowledge determined to know life fully before it slips away. As tensions heighten between Victor and the islanders Oona becomes the doctors trusted accomplice aiding in secret experiments and seeing horrors she sometimes wishes to forget. When May disappears Oona must face up to growing suspicions about the enigmatic employer to whom she has grown close but the truth is darker than anything she could imagine.