Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

In the frozen wastes of the Arctic, explorer Robert Walton rescues a dying man from the ice. That man is Victor Frankenstein, and his confession unfolds like a nightmare. Victor spent months in graveyards and charnel houses assembling a creature from stolen body parts, and when he succeeded, he did the one thing he should never have done: he abandoned it. The creature, intelligent and initially gentle, was met only with terror and rejection. Driven mad by isolation, he demands Victor build him a companion. When Victor refuses, the killing begins. Written by an eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley in 1818, this is the novel that invented science fiction and remains its most devastating interrogation of what we owe to what we create.