The Unicorn Sonata
Cover illustration and interior illustrations by Robert Rodriguez.
Locus Award winner (Locus Poll Award) for Best Novella 1997. British Fantasy Award Best novel nominee 1996.
On a hot summer day in Los Angeles, thirteen-year-old Josephine ”Joey” Rivera – a misfit in junior high school but a born musician – meets a disquieting young man named Indigo who plays ghostly, haunting music on a horn the hue of a conch shell. The sound of his music stays with her, distant and beguiling, until she follows it down an ordinary street and across an unseen border into a magical world called Shei'rah. There, satyrs, water nymphs, and six-inch-long dragons live side by side with phoenixes and two-headed serpents and the Eldest – the unicorns whose music is the soul of Shei'rah. There are dangers, too – from swarms of tiny, terrible flying creatures called perytons, and from a strange disease that is blinding the Eldest. To Joey, Shei'rah feels like home – but she already has a home across the Border, in our world. She has school and a family and a feisty, beloved grandmother, Abuelita, whom she visits every Sunday in a nursing home. There's also gruff old John Papas, whose dusty instrument-repair shop Joey cleans in exchange for music lessons, and who may know something about the Eldest himself. Within these two worlds whose borders merge mysteriously, Peter S. Beagle spins a tale of one girl who can make a difference. The Unicorn Sonata also tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes – and our ears – to find it.
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Peter S. Beagle
Peter Soyer Beagle (born 1939) is an American fantasist and author of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays. He is also a talented guitarist and folk singer. He wrote his first novel, urban fantasy A Fine and Private Place (1960), when he was only 19 years old. Travel book I See By My Outfit (1965) is a nonfiction classic. Today he is best known as the author of The Last Unicorn (1968), a modern fantasy classic.
Beagle's work as a screenwriter interrupted his early career direction as a fiction author, but in the 1990s he returned to prose fiction. Beagle's own favourite is a literary fantasy novel The Innkeeper's Song (1993). Four years later Beagle returned to the land that was the novels setting for a collection of short stories The Magician of Karakosk and Other Stories (1997, known as Giant Bones).
In 2005 Beagle finally published a coda to The Last Unicorn, a novelette entitled ”Two Hearts,” and began work on a full-novel sequel. In 2006, ”Two Hearts” won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and in 2007 it won the Nebula Award in the same category. The story was also nominated as a short fiction finalist for the World Fantasy Award. In 2006, Beagle won the Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Peter S. Beagle lives today in Oakland, California.
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