Claire Cameron. (2017). The Last Neanderthal: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Claire Cameron. 2017. The Last Neanderthal: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Claire Cameron, The Last Neanderthal: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

Claire Cameron. The Last Neanderthal: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

OverDrive Product Record

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     Claire Cameron's novel, The Bear, became a #1 national bestseller in Canada and was long-listed for the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, The Line Painter, was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award for best crime first novel and won the Northern Lit Award from the Ontario Library Service.
     Cameron's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Salon. She is a staff writer at The Millions and lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons.

   • name: Claire Cameron

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2017-04-25T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Last Neanderthal

fullDescription

From the author of The Bear, the enthralling story of two women separated by millennia, but linked by an epic journey that will transform them both.
Forty thousand years in the past, the last family of Neanderthals roams the earth. After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate.
But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself.
In the modern day, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby comes. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of early motherhood, both stories examine the often taboo corners of women's lives.
Haunting, suspenseful, and profoundly moving, The Last Neanderthal asks us to reconsider all we think we know about what it means to be human.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Emily Gray Tedrowe, USA Today
   • content: A powerful, warm and thought-provoking book that artfully blends facts with fiction to put flesh on many abstract scientific debates.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Trevor Corkum, Toronto Star
   • content: Claire Cameron reunites us with our past, with the beginning of humanity. In this book I lived next to people who populated the earth a very long time ago and have long since vanished completely. To make you feel for them, and what is more: feel with them is a great achievement. The Last Neanderthal is one of those novels that opens the world to you in a different way. And after you finish reading, this world will never look the same to you again.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
   • content: The Last Neanderthal is astonishing. With delicacy and tenderness, Claire Cameron imagines the struggles of a Neanderthal family to sustain itself physically and psychologically in the face of extinction. As we follow Girl, her mother and brothers, and a mysterious stray called Runt, we are put in touch with what is most ancient and noble in human nature. At the same time, the parallel contemporary narrative shows us how little, over the eons, the human heart has changed. I'm thrilled by Cameron's adventurous and deeply empathic tale, an example of what fiction at its best can do.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Herman Koch, bestselling author of The Dinner
   • content: Claire Cameron's newest novel, The Last Neanderthal, is fascinating, insightful and poignant; a moving narrative of the last survivors of a harsh and unforgiving environment that is both exotic and achingly familiar. It is a story of our profound connectedness to our ancestors, exploring the ultimate question of what it means to be truly 'human.'
5. • premium: False
   • source: Pamela Erens, author of Eleven Hours
   • content: The Last Neanderthal is a book like no other. Claire Cameron effortlessly inhabits the worlds of two very different women-a female Neanderthal desperate to survive and an archeologist who fears losing control of her dig site-and shows us they are not that different after all. A powerful novel that will make you cry. And laugh, too.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic's Daughter
   • content: This rich, literary, science-based imagining of Neanderthal life intrigued me from the start. The parallels between two women navigating complex lives from across time and space-and across a narrow species boundary-is captivating in itself. But more than this, while reading The Last Neanderthal, I felt myself standing with new feet within our human lineage. This book makes me want to pay attention to the senses that are in our blood-an alertness to vision, smell, touch, weather, the presence of other creatures-that can come naturally to us as a Homo sapiens, but have been lost from inattention and lack of use. I find myself walking into the world with a heightened awareness of what it means to be fully human.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Marcy Dermansky, author of The Red Car
   • content: Thoroughly immersed in the recent explosion in knowledge-and speculation-about our closest kin.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Mozart's Starling
   • content: The women of Cameron's The Last Neanderthal are fierce, whatever their time period. This meditation on motherhood, passion and survival is lush and lovingly detailed, creating a world that's frighteningly accurate and reassuringly heartfelt. Couldn't put it down.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Brian Bethune, Maclean's (Canada)
   • content: A necessary, brilliantly feminist and intuitive reading of our earliest history. Cameron memorably paints a full world with her Neanderthals and binds it perfectly to our own.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Eden Robinson, author of Monkey Beach
    • content: Forty millennia separate the two female protagonists of this impressively executed novel from the author of The Bear. ... [The] book's greatest strength [is] its ability to collapse time and space to draw together seemingly dissimilar species: ancestors and successors, writer and reader.
11. • premium: False
    • source: Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?
    • content: Cameron expertly intertwines Girl's and Rose's stories....an engaging tale that celebrates the search for life's meaning and its quotidian nature.
12. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
    • content: [A] gripping survival thriller...Cameron unspools the adventure in Anna's twitchy voice, heightening the tension...This agonizing odyssey of loss and being lost also has humor...The book's anguished yet hopeful ending provides a touching terminus...This expertly crafted novel could do for camping what Jaws did for swimming.
13. • premium: False
    • source: Carla Jean Whitley, BookPage
    • content: A page turner...The Bear creates suspense out of the...
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 27, 2017
      Forty millennia separate the two female protagonists of this impressively executed novel from the author of The Bear. In the distant past, a Neanderthal named Girl struggles to define her role in a depleted family that includes her aged mother, Big Mother; her brother, Him; and Runt, a foundling. Now of childbearing age, Girl is secretly impregnated by Him and soon thereafter cast out by Big Mother, and though the family is eventually reunited, a failed hunt leaves several of them dead. Girl is left to care for Runt while leading them to “the meeting place,” where they’ll hopefully join a new family. Interspersed with Girl’s story are flash-forwards to Rose, the pregnant anthropologist who unearths Girl’s bones positioned intimately beside those of a human. The births of both Rose and Girl’s children, past and present, threaten to destroy the lives of the respective mothers, as Rose is forced to leave the dig site, while Girl must deliver the baby alone in a snowstorm. The contrasting and similar reactions to motherhood are emblematic of the book’s greatest strength—its ability to collapse time and space to draw together seemingly dissimilar species: ancestors and successors, writer and reader. Agent: Denise Bukowski, the Bukowski Agency.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      March 1, 2017
      In a small, nearly inaccessible cavern on an archaeological dig in France, Dr. Rose Gale discovers two entwined skeletons, astonishing evidence of contact between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Who were these last--and first--peoples?Scrabbling for survival and with little need for words (indeed, their shortened larynxes might have made modulating language difficult), the last Neanderthal family members think of each other as simply Girl, the remaining daughter; Him, the elder brother; Bent, the younger brother with a deformed arm; Runt, a scrawny foundling taken in by the family; and Big Mother, the matriarch, who, at over 30, is declining rapidly. Transcending the challenges of bringing to life a nearly silent family, Cameron (The Bear, 2014, etc.) generates excitement through a hunt gone unexpectedly wrong and even an uncomfortable sexual tension. Just as Him prepares to meet a suitable mate at the fish run, an annual gathering of the dwindling Neanderthal population, Girl goes into heat. Big Mother attempts to keep the hormonally charged youths apart, but growing up in isolation has made it hard to convey the dangers of incest. Once the taboo is broken, Big Mother has no choice but to cast Girl out. Runt tags along for a while, but his smaller frame, lack of body hair, and inability to pack on muscle trouble Girl. The weeks pass, however, and Girl's worries shift as she realizes she is pregnant. Cameron's narrative arc shifts between Girl and Rose, separated by time yet inextricably linked through a bit of DNA. Centuries later, Rose, too, faces a cold world: tenure track jobs are scarce in academia, and financial disaster looms for her and her partner, Simon, so she races to secure funding from a prominent museum, excavate the site, and secure her reputation before the birth of their first child. Across millennia, Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, ancient girl and contemporary woman, hunter and scientist--all share much in common.

      COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2017
      

      Archaeologist Rosamund Gale races to finish excavating significant Neanderthal finds before giving birth, while 40,000 years in the past a Neanderthal named Girl cares for the foundling Runt. Following the bristlingly distinctive The Bear, a Baileys Women's Prize long-listed title.

      Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

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From the author of The Bear, the enthralling story of two women separated by millennia, but linked by an epic journey that will transform them both.
Forty thousand years in the past, the last family of Neanderthals roams the earth. After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate.
But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself.
In the modern day, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby comes. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of early motherhood, both stories examine the often taboo corners...

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