Note: A rough word count comes to 45.000 words, so it's a novel according to ISFDB standards.

Synopsis: From the front flap of the Turner first edition: "Peter S. Beagle, one of the modern masters of fantasy, has always shown us worlds which most of us glimpse only out of the corners of our eyes. Twenty years ago he wove a bestselling tale, The Last Unicorn, that captured the hearts of readers worldwide. Now he takes us back to the realm of unicorns in The Unicorn Sonata, and shows us a world that is at once fantastical and hauntingly real... One 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 the 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 Old Ones - 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 Old Ones. 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 Old Ones 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 of often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes - and our ears - to find it."