The Clan of the Cave Bear & The Valley of Horses: 2 novels in 1 - Jean M Auel

The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of Horses are the first two novels in Jean M. Auel's magnificent Earth's Children series, a sequence of novels whose subject is nothing less than what life was like 35,000 years ago.

The novels' heroine is Ayla, a courageous and indomitable young woman whose story begins when she is a five-year-old child orphaned by an earthquake and adopted by the Clan, a group of Neanderthals.

In The Clan of the Cave Bear, the child Ayla - physically and mentally different from the people who have adopted her inspires first surprise, then wariness and finally acceptance by the Clan. She is cared for by the Clan's medicine woman Iza, and Creb, its wise and respected holy man, but she makes an implacable enemy of the group's future leader. Broud does all he can to destroy her, but Ayla is a survivor.

In The Valley of Horses Ayla sets out alone, a fourteen year old, to travel the frigid steppes of a friendless landscape near vast glaciers until she finds the valley of horses. Around her are the great woolly mammoths and herds of prehistoric animals which graze the cold northern reaches.

Unable to return to her childhood home, or to find people like herself, the Cro Magnons, she settles in the valley and seeks friendship and love elsewhere. First she adopts a young filly whose dam she has killed for food, and later a wounded cave lion cub. But far away to the west, two young men have begun a Journey. One of them is Jondalar, whose destiny will be bound up inextricably with Ayla's.

Condition: Good hardcover with inscription in front