1812 was the year without a summer, when a volcanic eruption blotted out the sun, and it was also the season when a momentous friendship was forged. Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley (who wrote Frankenstein in that year) and Claire Clairmont (Mary's step-sister, pregnant with Byron's child) were neighbours across the shores of Lake Geneva. Byron had just fled from England following the scandal surrounding his separation from his wife and rumours of incest with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. This book charts the friendship between the flamboyant Byron and the youthful Shelleys and their friends and hangers-on, through Italy and England, through personal tragedies and passions, sex and scandal, wit and heartbreak - all accompanied by a prodigious and precocious outpouring of brilliant poetry which echoed the creative relationship between Byron and the Shelleys, and their shared view of the world, its follies and its hypocrisies.