Cleopatra and Frankenstein: ‘Move over Sally Rooney: this is the hottest new book’ - Sunday Times

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Mellors weaves an enticing tale of companionship and conflict within Cleo and Frank’s marriage. They’re from different walks of life and different generations, but both have demons nipping at their heels. Cleo is dealing with her mother’s passing and her strained relationship with her father. Frank faces similar struggles, with an estranged father and a mother who provided him with a less-than-healthy idea of love. As Frank turns to alcohol to numb his problems, Cleo grows frustrated with his frequent substance use. Despite their problems, the characters still feel deeply considered and relatable. New York City at the start of the 21st-century – pre-financial crisis, pre-Trump, pre-Covid – is captured with near-devotional lushness in this nostalgic debut. It’s an urban playground that struggling painter Cleo, 24 years old and stylishly British, is on the brink of being exiled from, her student visa due to expire in mere months, when she meets Frank, a fortysomething ad agency owner with a nice line in elevator chitchat. They wed on a whim to calamitous effect on both sides. In terms of depth, this novel is more Jay McInerney than Hanya Yanagihara, but Mellors proves herself a poetic chronicler of inky gloom as well as twinkly surfaces. Unattached: Essays on Singlehood

Despite there being potentially triggering moments, I didn’t feel depressed when reading Cleopatra and Frankenstein. It was more melancholic than outright depressing. It doesn’t descend into misery porn in the way books like A Little Life did.There was the subterranean Oyster Bar ….served with dialogue about childhood trauma, masturbation and a four-in-a-half year old who had her first orgasm. Rooney has this way of bothering me. I want her characters to figure it out because for some weird reason I am invested in them. Neither Cleo nor Frank inspired those same feelings in me. From their first ludicrous encounter to the end, I found the pair simply irritating, nothing more. And all of the side characters serve to hammer home the book's whole point about how a relationship can affect those around the couple. None of them felt real or believable. Book Genre: Adult, Adult Fiction, Contemporary, Fiction, Health, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Mental Health, New York, Romance I read this because everyone was comparing it to Sally Rooney, which I guess is appealing to me. But it brings all the stuff that irks me about Rooney— hipster millennials having endless navel-gazing pseudo-intellectual conversations about themselves and the universe —and misses out the key component that, for me, makes Rooney as engaging an author as she is irritating. This is the only part of this book I genuinely and actively disliked. Fortunately or unfortunately, it was nowhere close to enough to get me to shut up about it.

the book perfectly captures the messiness and complexities of relationships in the modern world, especially what happens when the honeymoon phase starts to wear off and reality sets in. mellors’ exploration of relationships also feels strikingly contemporary - in a fragmented world full of such choice and chaos, it’s becoming increasingly harder to figure out what you want, what you desire, to decide what it will take to bring ‘true happiness’, a notoriously obscure concept which everyone is still desperately trying to grasp anyway. Frank presents Cleo with the possibility of happiness, artistic freedom, and the chance to apply for a Green Card. Their spontaneous marriage has unforeseen consequences that alter not only their lives but also the lives of those around them. Cleopatra and Frankenstein Book Review: My Opinion

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They meet cute, and begin spouting off impossibly clever lines: all those sharp, witty retorts that you and I only think of twenty minutes after the fact. It's the latest in a string of literary fiction pieces that I've read that feel aspirational to that title. It's giving aggressive general fiction. There’s nothing wrong with writing books that are ripe for adaptation. Literary fiction is full of critically adored authors who hustled other jobs to pay the bills, and novels turned into series have given us some of our greatest television. But the type of enlightenment presented in certain novels, in which easy access to money makes chasing one’s art a matter only of finding oneself, ignores a world on fire with chaos and inequality. And it tends not to make for great TV either.