Claire Cameron

Claire Cameron grew up in Toronto and studied at Queen’s University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and The Millions, where she is a staff writer. Her first novel, The Line Painter, won the Northern Lit Award and was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Crime Writing Award for Best First Novel, and her second novel, The Bear, was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons.

The Last Neanderthal

Forty thousand years ago, a family of Neanderthals lives in isolation, carving out a life together amidst the unforgiving landscape. The oldest siblings, Girl and Him, are coming of age, and the clan plans to travel to the annual meeting place to find each of them mates. But as one danger after another takes a toll, Girl is left on her own to care for the foundling Runt, and sets out on a journey to find out what lies beyond her family’s familiar lands. In the present day, archeologist Rosamund Gale makes an unprecedented find of Neanderthal remains just as she finds out she is pregnant. Racing to complete the excavation before her baby comes, she longs to understand the full meaning of her startling discovery and what it tells us about the dawn of humanity. Inspired by the discovery that many modern humans have inherited genes from Neanderthals, Cameron has penned a haunting, suspenseful, and profoundly moving novel that asks us to reconsider what it means to be human.