Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, is “the quintessential story of the modern world” says Roger Luckhurst, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, London. It’s a “violent reconfiguring of our understanding of life and death, God and human and machine, in the pitiless light of modernity,” according to the US novelist and literary critic Lev Grossman.