This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Mary Shelley began Frankenstein on a rainy night in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816, when a group of friends challenged one another to write a ghost story. She was eighteen years old. What she produced over the following months was not a ghost story at all, but something stranger and more durable: the account of a young scientist who succeeds in creating life, and then abandons the creature he has made.
Victor Frankenstein, raised in comfort in Geneva and consumed by the new science of his age, assembles a living being from the dead and is horrified by what opens its eyes. He flees. The creature, nameless and alone, teaches himself language and thought by watching a family through a gap in a wall, and learns that the world has no place for him. What follows is a slow, patient demand for recognition, and a revenge that destroys everyone it touches.
The novel moves from the Alps to the Orkney Islands to the frozen Arctic, told in letters and confessions nested inside one another. Shelley wrote it as a young woman surrounded by poets, and it carries the questions of that circle: whether knowledge without judgment is a gift or a curse, what a person owes to the thing he has made, and whether loneliness can be a kind of education. Two centuries on, the creature has become a Halloween costume and a shorthand for scientific hubris - but the book itself is quieter, sadder and far stranger than its reputation suggests.
This unabridged recording presents the complete 1818-era text as published in the standard edition, including the four opening letters from the Arctic explorer Robert Walton, whose voyage frames the story. Narrated in a single voice by Alex Mercer.
