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.

Fulfilling her father’s wish for her to work in a museum, Edith takes a job cataloguing artwork at the National Gallery of Canada, where she meets an elderly cryptozoologist named Theo. Theo is searching for “Gauguin’s mystery bird” and has devoted his entire life to tracking down extinct animals. Navigating her way through Vivienne’s dark landscape while trying to win Liam’s heart, Edith develops an unlikely friendship with Theo when 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 three novels, most recently Why Birds Sing, which was described as a “must read” by the Globe and Mail and “not to be missed” by the Ottawa Citizen, a Best Book of the Year (Canada) by Audible, and a Great Group Reads selection by the Women’s National Book Association (USA). Her young adult novel The Mosaic was nominated for the White Pine Award and the Ottawa Book Awards and named an Indigo Best Teen Book, and her novel The Gallery of Lost Species was named an Indigo and Kobo Best Book and a Harper’s Bazaar Hottest Breakout Novel. Berkhout is also the author of five poetry collections, including Elseworlds, which won the Archibald Lampman Award. A recent finalist for the Alberta Magazine Awards, her poems have been featured in publications across Canada including Best Canadian Poetry 2024. Originally from Calgary, she lives in Ottawa. This Bright Dust is Berkhout’s fourth novel.

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...emotionally resonant…a good first novel...

Quill & Quire

Berkhout does a masterful job…

Toronto Star

Nina Berkhout brings a poet's eye to her debut novel, writing with a haunting sadness about the scaling down of one’s most tremendous dreams. Despite the undertone of life's fragility and disappointments, Edith’s sense of humour and ability to see things with detached irony makes her a powerful and endearing protagonist.

Suzanne Desrochers, author of Bride of New France

Berkhout's emotional and intellectual range make this novel a pleasure to read.

Winnipeg Free Press

This artful, multi-layered novel describes a love between two sisters that idealizes and mythologizes in an attempt to stave off loss. Nina Berkhout is a master at showing how we trick ourselves into believing that we can hunt down and hold the elusive other.

Claire Holden Rothman, author of My October

…one of the most deeply moving stories I have read in many years…

Globe and Mail