A World Without Summer: A Volcano Erupts, A Creature Awakens, and the Sun Goes Out

Discover how Mount Tambora's catastrophic eruption plunged the world into darkness, altering the global climate and inspiring the likes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The world was upside-down. The wind was fire. The sky was ash. The rain was rock.

When Mount Tambora, a volcano on the edge of the Indonesian archipelago, erupted in April 1815, it was the largest explosion in recorded history. The land around Indonesia was a hellscape of fire and smoke. In the months and years that followed, the fallout—a cloud of impossibly fine ash— spread through the atmosphere. It killed harvests on the other side of the world. It turned farmers into beggars and their children into orphans. It turned sunsets into molten nightmares.

That same year, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley fled England with poet Percy Shelley. While sheltering from the worst summer in Switzerland’s history, she watched the explosive thunderstorms over Lake Geneva and caught the spark of an idea. Almost overnight, Frankenstein was written.

In this work of middle grade nonfiction, Nicholas Day traces the forward and backward of a single event, weaving in the many people, places, and things that were affected—and created and invented!—as a result, while tackling the ever-worrying issue of climate change.