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.
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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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?
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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)
"Masterfully examines our connections to our evolutionary
cousins...a novel to cherish."--Trevor Corkum, Toronto Star
"Poignant...shines a mirror into our own humanity."--Martha Anne
Toll, The Millions
"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
"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)
"Transcending the challenges of bringing to life a nearly silent
family, Cameron generates excitement through a hunt gone
unexpectedly wrong."--Kirkus Reviews
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