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Claire Cameron

Last Neanderthal Paperback – Illustrated, April 17, 2018

by Claire Cameron (Author)

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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 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.

Print length

289 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Back Bay Books
Publication date

April 17, 2018
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.73 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0316314463
ISBN-13

978-0316314466
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Editorial Reviews

Review

PRAISE FOR THE LAST NEANDERTHAL:

"Arresting... Gripping... This vivid...novel makes clear how much we carry on from those who existed long before us."
―Emily Gray Tedrowe, USA Today

"Masterfully examines our connections to our evolutionary cousins...a novel to cherish."―Trevor Corkum, Toronto Star

"A powerful, warm and thought-provoking book that artfully blends facts with fiction to put flesh on many abstract scientific debates."―Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

"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."
―Herman Koch, bestselling author of The Dinner

"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."
―Pamela Erens, author of Eleven Hours

"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.'"―Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic's Daughter

"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."
―Marcy Dermansky, author of The Red Car

"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."
―Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Mozart's Starling

"Thoroughly immersed in the recent explosion in knowledge-and speculation-about our closest kin."
―Brian Bethune, Maclean's (Canada)

"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."―Eden Robinson, author of Monkey Beach

"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."
―Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

"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."―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Cameron expertly intertwines Girl's and Rose's stories....an engaging tale that celebrates the search for life's meaning and its quotidian nature."―Carla Jean Whitley, BookPage

"Cameron pulls out all the literary stops in giving Neanderthals as much free rein, agency, and authenticity as possible.... This could easily be the best book that shakes up the classic Neanderthal tropes in science fiction and fantasy."―Lydia Pyne, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Poignant...shines a mirror into our own humanity."―Martha Anne Toll, The Millions

"Transcending the challenges of bringing to life a nearly silent family, Cameron generates excitement through a hunt gone unexpectedly wrong."―Kirkus Reviews

"The Last Neanderthal offers current science but places it in the context of emotional lives, particularly the intensity of pregnancy and childbirth --- and in so doing, Cameron urges readers to reflect on just what being "human" really means."―Norah Piehl, BookReporter

"The Last Neanderthal is emotionally engaging.... This immersive story unites two women across time [and] infuses the interrelated stories with warmth, enhanced by vivid details about Neanderthal experiences."―Suzan L. Jackson, Shelf Awareness

"Cameron understands what we share with our distant cousins-those basic emotions, fundamental feelings-but she also has a seamless understanding of the contours of those feelings and she uses that natural empathy to incredible effect. It's perhaps a strange thing to say about a novel that's fundamentally about extinction, but The Last Neanderthal is a pleasure to read."
―Stassa Edwards, Jezebel

"A deeply sympathetic portrait of a Neanderthal girl struggling to survive some 40,000 years ago, battling leopards, bison, a brutal winter and starvation. Her vivid survival story is interwoven with the tale of a pregnant archaeologist named Rosamund, who makes a startling discovery when she finds the fossilized remains of a Neanderthal and a human buried next to each other."―Alexandra Alter, New York Times

About the Author

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.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (April 17, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 289 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316314463
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316314466
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.73 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #479,749 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,376 in Historical British & Irish Literature
- #6,920 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #29,680 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
265 ratings

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Claire Cameron

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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. 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. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons.

Customer reviews

5 star		54%
4 star		22%
3 star		16%
2 star		5%
1 star		3%

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Lawrence G.

Too Many Questions Left Unanswered

Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2017

Verified Purchase

A great read, BUT it ended too suddenly, with no real denouement. I felt like my kindle had malfunctioned and somehow eaten the last two hundred pages... for at least five minutes after I read the last page, I shuffled all around my kindle, in an attempt to see if I had somehow "skipped" the real conclusion. It almost seems like the author is preparing us for a sequel, but the ending doesn't even fit into the structure of a "Book One." If I had not been enthralled and fascinated while reading the novel, if I had not been filled with admiration for the author's craft and for all the research she so lovingly did to breathe life into her characters and into their situations, I would have chalked the awful ending up to poor editing or to a case of not having any idea how to proceed with the story line. I am well aware of the intricacies of deconstructing fiction and of allowing the reader to form his or her own conclusions, but not like this. I feel cheated and dissatisfied.

51 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

The book should have had a whole 2nd half

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2017

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I really liked this book. I gave it 3 stars because the author ended it too soon. There was much more to be written unless the marketing plan is to split a good satisfying read into 2 parts to make more money (grrrrrrr). Because that's what it felt like what happened. The book ended rather abruptly and you could tell that there was a whole story line just waiting to be explored. My other "beef" was the photo at the end of the book. This is picky, I know, I know, but please don't take a real photo of skeletons that actually exist (the Lovers of Valdaro, 6,000 years old) and photoshop it to fit your narrative (i.e. Neanderthal and Home Sapiens. 40,000 years old). I think that will lead a lot of people not that familiar with archaeology to think that the book is based on a small fragment of reality when actually there is no such burial. It's duplicitous and implies something that is not true.

18 people found this helpful

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Boricuagal

A Tale of Two Women

Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2017

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I read all the Jean Auel books, and my favorite was the first one, which was all about a Neanderthal clan. I found The Last Neanderthal much more realistic in its depiction of what the day to day life of a small group of Neanderthals must have been like. How extremely dangerous and precarious their very existence was in a world full of perils, from lions and leopards to actual starvation in the prolonged winters of the Ice Age. But the best aspect of this book is the two stories it tells: Girl, the magnificent young Neanderthal woman, so resourceful and strong and yet kind enough to care for a child not hers and even to bond with a wildcat; and Rose, the paleoarcheologist who discovers Girl's remains 40,000 years later. Rose, too, is a suvivor and a fighter, and she has a keen insight into what the bones of Girl and of how and where she was found can tell us about how Neanderthals died out and what their contact with modern humans could have been like. There is bond between these two women that transcends the millennia. Their common humanity is a powerful and moving story.

12 people found this helpful

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Craig E. Dupler

A Story Well Told

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2018

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Great read. Cameron has done an excellent job of pulling in most of what we now think we know for sure about Neanderthals, and adds a good sprinkling of the most reasonable inferences. It is also interesting that the main character in the "way back" part of the story is a sympathetic view from the point of view of a Neanderthal woman. One is immediately drawn to Jean Auel's first Ayla book, which was from the point of view of a human. As in Auel's first book, the circumstances of being an orphan with "the other humanoids" at the time plays a critical role. So that part is not novel. That said, some sort of orphan scenario is the least confrontational way to explore a close relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals. It avoids the more confrontational and violent aspects of what must have been the interactions.

The other half of the novel is set in out time and is about the interactions with what we are left to infer as being the ancient heroine of the story by a modern woman archaeologist. Some aspects of the modern story, while being a fair portrayal in their situational realities and complexities, are never-the-less a bit extreme, especially when contrasted to the more even flow of the "way back" story. One gets the sense that there is an influence from Diana Gabaldon's work with her character Claire in the Outlander series, as the perspective shifts back and forth between two eras. One Claire influenced by another?

There is one aspect of the design of the book itself, which is not clear as to whether it is something Claire Cameron did, or perhaps the book design team at Hachette, within Little Brown did. We are not told in the book itself and I have not been to an author reading where I could ask the question. But, the book ends with a Photoshopped version of an otherwise quite famous 6000 year old human/human couple burial from Northern Italy by Dagmar Hollman. The actual human male in the Hollman photo has had its skull changed to appear Neanderthal and presumably be the female lead character in the book, while the female human is inferred to be her male partner. It's a great tease as a way to provide a starting point for a story-line for a follow-on book, and presumably a movie.

If there is a movie and follow-on series and industry that starts from this, let's hope that it captures the authenticity achieved by JJ Annaud in "Quest for Fire" as opposed to the complete mess that was made of the Ayla story in the Clan of the Cave Bear Movie, which I do not think was even the least bit the fault of Daryl Hannah. Chapman was just no where nearly as skilled as Annaud, but then who is? But my point is that this is a really exciting start, which could lead to more great books and at least one good movie, or it could be a really bright spot that starts going downhill. Let's hope that Claire Cameron has the talent and toughness required to keep things going in the well above average (not great, but well above average) direction she has started.

Now if only a few good authors and directors would take on the human/homo erectus interactions ...

2 people found this helpful

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Susan Beamon

The last Neanderthal

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2017

Verified Purchase

It is easier to say what this book is not than to decide what it is. It is not a romance. It is not non-fiction. It is not science fiction, not matter how hard I want it to be. It is two stories wrapped together, separated by time. One story is about a woman who had certain controversial theories about Neanderthals. She became an archaeologist so she could find evidence to prove those theories. Just as she makes the find of her career, she gets pregnant, adding the stresses of being a pregnant woman in a "man's job" to her other pressures. The other story is the life struggle of what appears to be the last survivor of a Neanderthal family. The population had been falling and now seems to be mostly gone.
I'm not sure I fully accept the Neanderthal lifestyle. Most of it in the story has been supported by current research, but not all. Still, it does hang together.
All in all, I liked this book. Parts of it were very thought provoking.

5 people found this helpful

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A. R. W. Jarvis

N/A

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 5, 2021

Verified Purchase

I was not entirely satisfied with the authors depiction of the Neanderthals.They seem to have a vocabulary of only a handfull of words despite having vocal chords and working as teams as part of their life style and existing for hundreds of thousands of years.Don,t get me wrong there are a lot of good points in the book(Loved the ending),but I think the Neanderthals were smarter than this book gives them credit for.

Amy Roodenberg

Interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2021

Verified Purchase

I really enjoyed this book. It was savage yet sweet. I loved the way it looks at the core of being a woman in the modern and extreme world. Would recommend to other historical readers!

Tomo

Great insight

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2022

Verified Purchase

Enjoyed this novel having previously read a about life in neanderthal times. I think , from what we know, it is pretty realistic. A simple but enjoyable tale

Martin V.

Gripping and moving novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 9, 2021

Verified Purchase

Could not recommend highly enough and especially so to those interested in this part of our history

docrankin

I find the Neanderthals, endlessly fascinating. Here was ...

Reviewed in Canada on June 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

I find the Neanderthals, endlessly fascinating. Here was a separate homo species, who roamed Europe for over 200,000 years until going extinct 30,000 years ago.
In this novel Claire Cameron tries to see their world, through the eyes of a young female Neanderthal, who is struggling to survive as her family suffers repeated tragedy. Ms Cameron succeeds in creating a very realistic landscape/atmosphere, giving one a sense of how life might have been for this Homo species.

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