The Plains of Passage: Earth's Children, Book Four: 4 - Softcover

Auel, Jean M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553289411 ISBN 13: 9780553289411

Publisher: Bantam, 1997

Synopsis

Jean M. Auel's enthralling Earth's Children(R) series has become a literary phenomenon, beloved by readers around the world. In a brilliant novel as vividly authentic and entertaining as those that came before, Jean M. Auel returns us to the earliest days of humankind and to the captivating adventures of the courageous woman called Ayla.

With her companion, Jondalar, Ayla sets out on her most dangerous and daring journey--away from the welcoming hearths of The Mammoth Hunters and into the unknown. Their odyssey spans a beautiful but sparsely populated and treacherous continent, the windswept grasslands of Ice Age Europe, casting the pair among strangers.

Some will be intrigued by Ayla and Jondalar, with their many innovative skills, including the taming of wild horses and a wolf; others will avoid them, threatened by what they cannot understand; and some will threaten them. But Ayla, with no memory of her own people, and Jondalar, with a hunger to return to his, are impelled by their own deep drives to continue their trek across the spectacular heart of an unmapped world to find that place they can both call home.

About this title

Review

Jean Auel's The Plains of Passage, the fourth volume in the Earth's Children sequence, is one of the most massive yet (running to nearly 1,000 pages) and has all the sweep and vigour of the earlier books in the series. There are few writers who demonstrate the sheer range and ambition of Auel in the fantasy field. The Clan of the Cave Bear was a truly ground-breaking work, with its sweeping historical saga crammed with the kind of detail that had never been seen before in the genre. The Valley of Horses and The Mammoth Hunters continued to enthral readers with their breathtaking panoplies of an ancient world.

The Plains of Passage continues the epic description of our civilisation as it was 25,000 years ago. Auel's protagonists Ayla the orphan and Jondalar the traveller decide to forsake the comfort and safety of life with the mammoth hunters by the Black Sea, and set out on a daunting odyssey. Their plan is to traverse a continent, heading for the Cro-Magnon settlement which Jondalar called home as a young man. Their journey across unimaginable distances is fraught with spectacular dangers, and their only companions are the half-tame Wolf, the magnificent stallion Racer and the mare Whinney.

As so often in Auel's work, it's the brilliantly evocative scene-setting that makes her narratives of high adventure so impressive. Characterisation is, as always, functional rather than inspired, but it's perfectly suited to the Technicolor landscapes the reader is confronted with. And the descriptive passages are as evocative as ever:

The rising sun peaked over the eastern edge with a blinding burst of light that illuminated an incredible scene. To the west, a flat, utterly featureless dazzling white plain stretched out before them. Above it the sky was a shade of blue she had never seen in her life. It had somehow absorbed the reflection of the red dawn, and the blue-green undertone of glacial ice...

--Barry Forshaw

Review

"Pure entertainment at its sublime, wholly exhilarating, best... Auel, a superb raconteur, has crafted a consistently engaging adventure story with a solid historical underpinning."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Thrilling... This magical book is rich in details of all kinds... but it it the depth of the characters' emotional lives... that gives the novel such a stranglehold."
--Cosmopolitan

"Gripping."
--Boston Sunday Herald

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0553289411
• ISBN 13: 9780553289411
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 912