"Zorka Carpenter never knew anything about love, though everyone around her seemed to. The experience turned her mother into a martyr as she waited and prayed to obscure saints for the return of her husband, who left the family when Zorka was only eleven. It took Zorka's friend, the beautifully poised and assured Zoe Christie, and made her a weepy, insecure adolescent. Zorka observed that even love for modern architecture had an effect on genius child Kris Tina Woo, who traveled the world obsessed with finding the alleged ninth Monument of the elusive architect Richard Dorsey." "So instead of love, Zorka seeks companionship in the strangest of places, befriending a fastidious termite, who offers her the consistent devotion her father, mother and friends have never been able to give. With this friendship, a new world unfurls, bringing a new family that includes insects, birds, fish, and rodents who are all considered damaged in some way. Living in a modernist greenhouse erected by her former high school classmate Kris Tina, Zorka spends her time cultivating her relationship with her menagerie and isolating herself from the world beyond." "But when an enigmatic man, seeking to escape the acclaim he garnered in his youth, stumbles into her world, Zorka finds herself opening her life for the first time, leading her to discover places and feelings she had never imagined. With fragmented clues to his former days of glory, Zorka must piece together what went awry, while confronting demons from her own past and learning to let go of her self-contained life so that she may finally find love."--BOOK JACKET.