Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors Review: A Glittering, Uneven Debut Novel

Cleopatra and Frankenstein opens on New Year's Eve 2007, when Cleo — a beautiful, blond, aspiring British painter — meets Frank, an older, award-winning advertising executive, in an elevator 90 minutes before midnight. Their quick-witted exchange becomes dinner and flirtation, and Mellors fast-forwards to their wedding day just six months later. As the Los Angeles Times noted, this temporal leap is a deliberate narrative choice: courtship is rendered as a "heedless blur, the details only coming into focus once a marriage has set (or curdled)." The novel then charts what comes next — resentment, infidelity, carelessness, and the childhood damage both carry into the marriage. Frank's mother was an emotionally distant alcoholic; Cleo's died by suicide. Their intoxicating chemistry keeps them together even as those unresolved histories work steadily against them.

The structure is episodic, with chapters that introduce a wide cast of supporting characters drawn from the couple's orbit: creative strivers, trust-fund wanderers, and what the LA Times describes as people who "had found the intersection between creativity and economy, who made beautiful things but did not suffer for it." No one in this world is truly poor — even the struggling artists are cushioned by inheritances and safety nets — and Mellors makes that socioeconomic texture an explicit part of her subject.

Mellors arrives as a British-American novelist working squarely in the tradition of sharp, socially observed New York fiction. Waterstones selected Cleopatra and Frankenstein as a Fiction Book of the Month, and the novel went on to become a national bestseller and a Goodreads Choice Award finalist. The Barnes & Noble publisher description positions it as "a romp through the underbelly of the Downtown Manhattan elite" — a phrase that captures both its social ambition and its tonal lightness. Comparisons to Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends circulated in early coverage, with ES Magazine suggesting that fans of Rooney's work would find much to love here. Those comparisons locate the novel in a recognizable contemporary mode: relationship-driven literary fiction with a keen eye for millennial anxiety, class performance, and the wreckage intimacy can cause.

The novel's greatest asset is the central relationship itself. The chemistry between Cleo and Frank is, as one reader response noted, "immediately felt," and Mellors constructs their bond with enough warmth and specificity that their eventual unraveling carries genuine weight. Publishers Weekly singled out Eleanor — a screenwriter who takes a freelance position at Frank's firm and develops a flirtation with him — as a particular highlight, writing that "her winning sections achieve the mix of wit, pathos, and romance the rest strives to attain." Eleanor functions almost as a proof of concept: she demonstrates that Mellors is fully capable of the tonal balance the novel aims for throughout. The Evening Standard described being "intensely consumed" by the book's world, and Waterstones praised it as "a great, swooning love story" that is simultaneously "a shattering depiction of how addiction and mental illness warp our lives" and "a perceptive, witty portrait of globalized New York."

The novel's supporting cast is where its ambitions most visibly strain. Publishers Weekly observed that the satirical portrait of New York life "too often reads like caricature," pointing to characters such as Zoe, Frank's younger half-sister, who attends a "Climaxing to Consciousness" workshop, and Santiago, a Peruvian chef whose self-description — "The fat friend. The sidekick. But I have feelings. I feel a lot." — tips from pathos into broad sketch. The LA Times noted that many characters carry "origin stories and ethnicities that do too much of the work of explaining who they are," a critique that lands on one of the novel's structural habits: shortcutting interiority through social type. Publishers Weekly also identified the overall tone and intrigue as "a bit scattered," a fair charge against a book that juggles marital drama, addiction, grief, satire, and ensemble comedy across 384 pages. Not every thread receives equal development, and the novel's ambition occasionally outpaces its execution.

Readers drawn to emotionally charged relationship fiction set against a vividly rendered urban backdrop — particularly those who responded to Conversations with Friends or to novels that treat addiction and grief with candor rather than sentimentality — will find Cleopatra and Frankenstein a rewarding if imperfect read. The central marriage is explored, as one response put it, without "embarrassment or deflection," and the novel does not resolve into easy comfort. At the same time, readers who prefer tightly controlled ensemble casts or consistent satirical tone may find the unevenness genuinely distracting. Publishers Weekly's verdict — "an enticing aura glows at this work's heart" — captures the experience well: the novel's emotional core is strong enough to sustain it, even where the architecture around that core shows its seams.