Switzerland, 1816. Lord Byron, Shelley, Shelley's wife Mary, and Byron's physician Dr Polidori gather at Villa Diodati. Polidori is their intellectual inferior, a mere hanger-on, but he is on a quest to outwit them all. Through a Faustian pact with Annette Legrand, the mysterious third member of the notorious vaudeville act, the Legrand sisters, he has obtained the most frightening vampire story ever written, which he will read out on the very night Mary Shelley first performs her tale of Frankenstein. But, in exchange, what must Polidori offer this ghostly female predator! What of the sisters' thirst for human male fluids?
The Merciful Women is a subversive Gothic literary game which sets the traditional horror story on its head. Opium and erotica provide the background for this ironic novel of grand themes, sex and literature.

The Anatomist:
'A fascinating book gripping, a pleasure to read, and a very fine novel.' Iain Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost
'The Anatomist should do for the clitoris what Longitude did for the chronometer,' Francis Gilbert, The Times