Waiting on Wednesday (August 25)

Thirty-four year old, Professor Clara Fitzgerald has been living in the shadows of her fiancé for too long. While her career seems stalled, his scientific research is on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Professor Anthony Greene is an ambitious geneticist, who is being courted by the top universities and powerful pharmaceutical companies. His fight against cancer in the laboratory doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for Clara anymore.

But when Clara stumbles on an old copy of Frankenstein and remembers her mother’s claim that they are related to the nineteenth-century author, Mary Shelley, everything changes.

With her beautiful but troublesome sister in tow and the help of Kay, a retired Shelley scholar, Clara begins a search for the author’s long lost journals and letters. This search reveals surprising facts about the passionate young woman who wrote Frankenstein, who was the child of two radical writers, and who eloped to Europe with a wild-eyed poet named Percy Shelley.

During her search, Clara also unearths shocking secrets about her fiancé. Like Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, Anthony is on a secret quest to extend life – and this quest has driven him to cross ethical lines.

Told from alternating points of view between Clara and the young Mary Shelley who is preparing to write Frankenstein, Out of the Shadows is a tale of hubris and greed, passion and truth, loss and love. It is a story that spans two centuries and warns us about the age-old dangers of mixing ambition with the power of science.