Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World is an intensely researched study of the effects of the volcanic eruption that took place on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies in April of 1815. It stands as the largest eruption in the past 10,000 years.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood traces Tambora’s global and historical reach: how the volcano’s three-year climate change regime initiated the first worldwide cholera pandemic, expanded opium markets in China, and plunged the United States into its first economic depression.

Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, as the endless cold rain in the summer of 1816 kept her housebound on the shores of Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was 18 years old.