The world's most famous monster comes to life in this 1818 novel, a compelling narrative that combines Gothic romance and science fiction to tell of an ambitious young doctor's attempts to breathe life into an artificial man. Despite the doctor's best intentions, the experiment goes horribly wrong in a timeless tale about the hazards of playing creator

A futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague, The Last Man is Mary Shelley’s most important novel after Frankenstein. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters. Set in an apocalyptic future ending in the year 2100, Shelley’s 1826 novel concerns a plague that destroys almost all of humankind