I have followed love through every life
and found it always led to you.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley*

He spent his life searching for love.
The woman he wanted was waiting in Hell.

Percy Bysshe Shelley believes in freedom, revolution, love without possession, and very little that cannot be explained by reason.
Then he meets Amara.

It is the summer of 1816, and Percy has followed Mary Godwin to Lake Geneva, where storms have trapped a notorious collection of writers inside Villa Diodati. Byron is writing, Polidori is watching everyone, Mary has begun dreaming of monsters, and Percy keeps seeing a woman who should not be there.

Beautiful. Infuriating. Impossible.

Amara belongs to a world Percy claims not to believe in, and she has no intention of becoming another poet’s obsession. Hell already has plans for her. Caius will rise, thrones will change hands, and Amara has spent centuries believing she knows exactly where she belongs.
Percy complicates everything.

He returns to Mary. He marries her, builds a life with her, writes, grieves, travels, and tries to become the man he believes he should be. Yet through every year that follows Geneva, Amara keeps finding him, and every time she disappears, Percy is left chasing something no mortal woman can give him.

By 1822, he has stopped asking her to stay.
He wants to follow.
Amara refuses. Percy is alive, and for all his reckless talk of death and eternity, she knows exactly what waits beyond the mortal world.

Then a storm finds his boat off the Italian coast.
As the sea closes over him, Percy has one final chance to fight for the life he has spent years trying to understand.
Instead, he calls for her and this time, Amara answers.

And Hell is about to discover that giving Percy Shelley a place among its dead may have been a spectacular mistake.

The saga opens September 17, 2026.
Book Two arrives October 15, 2026.
Book Three arrives October 31, 2026.

Books Four, Five, and Six arrive September 2027.

 

Author’s Note

Percy Bysshe Shelley was real.

His poetry, political beliefs, relationships, years of exile, friendship with Lord Byron, the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, and his death at sea in 1822 all belong to history.
This novel does not attempt to rewrite that history as fact. It takes the known life of Percy Shelley and imagines what might have existed in the spaces history could never record.

Amara is a fictional supernatural character from my connected Hell Touched and The Cursed Poet universe. Her relationship with Percy, her role in Hell, and the supernatural events surrounding his death and afterlife belong entirely to the fictional mythology of these series.

The poems and verses attributed to Percy within this novel that do not come from his documented work are original fiction written by me, inspired by Shelley’s life, themes, and literary legacy. They are not lost, recovered, or previously unpublished poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The story also draws upon the famous account surrounding Shelley’s cremation, particularly the legend that his heart did not burn. That story has survived in different forms through memoir, biography, and literary history. In this novel, it becomes part of the supernatural fiction.

Historical figures including Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and others appear throughout the novel. Historical places, dates, letters, events, and details are sometimes represented faithfully and sometimes adapted to serve the fictional story.

Where history ends, the fire begins.

Cara Ravelli

 *The opening verse attributed to Percy in this novel is an original work of fiction written by me, inspired by Shelley’s life, themes, and literary legacy. It is not a lost, recovered, or previously unpublished poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.