Wild Talent tells the strange tale of Jeannie Guthrie, a sixteen-year-old Scottish farm worker, who possesses a frightening talent. Believing that she has unintentionally killed her ne’er-do-well cousin, and fearing that she will be sentenced as a witch, she flees to London. There, she is befriended by the free-spirited and adventurous Alexandra David, and introduced to Madame Helena Blavatsky’s famous salon, where she begins to understand the source of her mysterious powers. We follow Jeannie and Alexandra as they venture from the late Victorian world of spiritualists and theosophists to the fin de siècle Paris of artists, anarchists and esoteric cults; and finally to the perilous country of the Beyond. It is against these eerie late 19th century backdrops that Kernaghan weaves an engrossing tale of myth and magic.

Eileen Kernaghan lives in New Westminster, British Columbia. Sophie, in Shadow is Kernaghan’s ninth book in the fantasy genre. Eileen’s first young adult fantasy, Dance of the Snow Dragon, was set in 18th century Bhutan. It was followed by The Snow Queen, which won an Aurora Award for Canadian science fiction and fantasy, and was shortlisted by the Canadian Library Association for Best Children’s Book of the Year. The Alchemist’s Daughter, set in Elizabethan England, was shortlisted for the Sheila Egoff Prize for Children’s Literature and the Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award. Winter on the Plain of Ghosts, which also appeared in 2004, is an adult historical fantasy set in the ancient Indus Valley civilization. Wild Talent: a Novel of the Supernatural, a novel of spiritualism in Victorian England and fin de siècle Paris, appeared in 2008, and was shortlisted for a Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.

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• Short-listed, Sunburst Award for best Canadian Literature of the Fantastic