THE GALLERY OF LOST SPECIES

Just as thirteen year-old Edith Walker is about to leave childhood behind, she thinks she spots a unicorn high on a slope while hiking. Her daydreamer father Henry convinces her that what she's seen is real. Edith's sighting of the fabled creature - and her unfailing belief that the imaginary creature will eventually be found - sets in motion a series of events that impact the next decade of her life.

Edith grows up in her big sister Vivienne's shadow. While the beautiful Viv is forced by the girls' overbearing mother Constance to compete in child beauty pageants, plain-looking Edith follows in her father's footsteps, collecting oddities, studying coins and reading from moldy books that only serve to exacerbate her asthma.

Eventually, a family trip to the Rocky Mountains and a chance encounter with a handsome geology student named Liam changes the course of the sisters' relationship forever. As Viv rebels against her mother and pageantry to become a painter, she embarks on a downward spiral into addiction. Edith then finds herself torn between a desire to save her sister and pursuing her own love for Liam.

Navigating her way through Vivienne's dark landscape while trying to win Liam's heart, Edith develops an unlikely friendship with an elderly cryptozoologist named Theo. With time, she realizes they might have more in common than she imagined: they are both trying to retrieve something that may be impossible to bring back to life.

THE GALLERY OF LOST SPECIES is about finding solace in unexpected places - in works of art, in people and in animals that the world has forgotten.

Nina Berkhout is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Elseworlds, which won the 2013 Archibald Lampman Award, and Arrivals and Departures, which was a finalist for the same award in 2011.