The Clan of the Cave Bear
by Jean M. Auel
Summary
An earthquake orphans a five year old Cro Magnon girl in prehistoric Ice Age Europe, and after a cave lion leaves deep claw marks on her thigh, a Neanderthal clan traveling in search of a new home finds her half dead and takes her in against most of the group's judgment. Iza, the clan's medicine woman, raises the girl as her own and names her Ayla, training her in the plant based healing lore that gives a Clan woman her only real status, while Creb, Iza's brother and the clan's crippled, one eyed spiritual leader, comes to love Ayla as a daughter even though her tall body, straight legs, and different way of thinking mark her as unmistakably other to everyone around her. Broud, the clan leader's son and Ayla's lifelong tormentor, forces himself on her repeatedly once he is old enough to claim that right under Clan law, and Ayla bears his son, Durc, a child other clan members regard as deformed because his mixed features show more of Ayla's kind than the Clan's own. When Broud finally becomes leader himself, he uses his authority to have Ayla cursed and cast out, and she leaves the only family she has known to search alone for people who look like her, forced to hand Durc over to the clan's protection rather than risk his life on the journey.
Auel writes in dense, deliberately explanatory prose, pausing often to describe tool making, plant lore, or Clan hunting ritual in a way that reads more like an anthropologist's field notes than a conventional adventure novel, and the pace slows accordingly; readers who love the book tend to love exactly that immersive detail, and readers who do not tend to name the same passages as the reason they put it down.
Historical Context & Significance
Crown published The Clan of the Cave Bear in 1980, and it earned Auel a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and a nomination for the American Book Award for best first novel in 1981, an award then given for debuts alongside the more familiar National Book Award. No larger literary prize followed a book that reviewers tended to treat as a genre bestseller rather than a contender, even as it climbed steadily up national bestseller lists on the strength of word of mouth.
The novel became the first of six in Auel's Earth's Children series and a commercial phenomenon, selling in the tens of millions worldwide across its life; a 1986 film adaptation starring Daryl Hannah as Ayla condensed the novel's slow accumulation of detail into a much shorter, less faithful story that Auel herself was reportedly unhappy with.