About the Author

JEAN M. AUEL’s Earth’s Children® series includes The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters, The Plains of Passage, and the forthcoming The Shelters of Stone. She and her husband, Ray, live in Oregon, where she is working on the sixth volume of the series.

Reviews

"Pure entertainment at its sublime, wholly exhilarating, best... Auel, a superb raconteur, has crafted a consistently engaging adventure story with a solid historical underpinning."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Thrilling... This magical book is rich in details of all kinds... but it it the depth of the characters' emotional lives... that gives the novel such a stranglehold."
--Cosmopolitan

“Gripping.”
--Boston Sunday Herald

"Pure entertainment at its sublime, wholly exhilarating, best... Auel, a superb raconteur, has crafted a consistently engaging adventure story with a solid historical underpinning."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Thrilling... This magical book is rich in details of all kinds... but it it the depth of the characters' emotional lives... that gives the novel such a stranglehold."
--Cosmopolitan

"Gripping."
--Boston Sunday Herald

The long-awaited fourth installment of the Earth's Children series is as warm and inviting as its campfire milieu. sure fire bestseller. Auel again describes her characters' travails, a passionate interest of millions of readers, in impeccably researched detail. The continuous recitation of flora and fauna, coupled with flashbacks to events in the previous books, becomes somewhat tiresome, however. (Would that our ``memory'' were as instinctual as that of the Clan.) The saga continues the cross-continental journey of Ayla, her mate Jondalar and their menagerie to his homeland. En route, they encounter a variety of problems, yet manage to find panaceas for each. Their enlightened compilation of skills, inventions, therapies and recipes transforms the voyagers into spirit-like personas providing The Others with constant awe. A brief encounter with the Neanderthal Clan rekindles the unique charm of the first (and strongest) book. Such locutions as ``out of the cooking skin into the coals'' or ``Mother's path of milk'' for the Milky Way are coyly anachronistic. Nonetheless, this volume is as welcome as letters from a long-lost friend. A novel 1.25 million first printing; major ad/promo; first serial to Ladies' Home Journal; BOMC main selection; author tour. (Oct.)