Books by Jean Auel
“The power of these books and of Jean Auel’s work is that she took huge amounts of time to research the archaeology, even bush skills: how you survive, what you could eat. She also describes the environment. For some people, she does this in mind-numbing detail; for me, it was incredibly inspirational detail. What does the mammoth steppe look like? What does it smell like? She’ll even talk about the grittiness that’s always in your teeth because there’s a constant wind blowing off the glaciers that contains this stuff we call loess, which is a talcum-fine sediment made up of ground-up rock that glaciers produce. We find this stuff, metres deep, in deposits all over northern Europe. The fact that it’s in your teeth all the time and that level of detail of world building is what made these books particularly powerful for me; but not just me.” Read more...
Interviews where books by Jean Auel were recommended
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1
The Inheritors
by William Golding, with a foreword by Ben Okri -
2
The Clan of the Cave Bear
by Jean Auel -
3
The Last Neanderthal
by Claire Cameron -
4
The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature
by Ludovic Slimak and translated by David Watson -
5
The Seventh Son
by Sebastian Faulks
Five Books Imagining Neanderthals, recommended by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Five Books Imagining Neanderthals, recommended by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
All archaeologists have to do some imagining because the data they work with is so partial and fragmentary, says Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. She picks five books that help bring to life our closest relations, from a historical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning writer to a work of sci-fi about a hybrid Neanderthal child.
