The Passage
Roughly thirty thousand years before the present, Ayla and Jondalar leave the Mamutoi camp on the central Russian steppe and turn west, intending to make the long overland trek back to Jondalar's home among the Zelandonii in southwestern France. Across one ice-age year, they cross the great river basin of what will become the Dniester and the Danube, share game with a Sharamudoi clan in the Carpathian foothills, ferry the four-mile width of the Donau Gates on a half-finished raft, and survive a brutal winter on the frozen plain at the foot of the receding glacier. Ayla's cave lion and her gentled horses, Whinney and Racer, travel with them. Jean M. Auel's fourth Earth's Children novel, published in 1990, is at once a road book, a prehistoric ethnography, and a love story, drawing on years of paleolithic research to imagine what late ice-age Europe might have looked like to the people who walked it.
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Three of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about The Passage
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
When a US Army research program in the Colorado mountains turns twelve death-row inmates into something faster and hungrier than men, the agent in charge takes the program's youngest test subject, a six-year-old girl named Amy, and runs. A century later, a small California outpost reads her file.
The most commonly searched is The Passage by Justin Cronin (2010), the first book in his post-apocalyptic vampire trilogy. The metadata above lists Jean M. Auel in error.
Justin Cronin's Passage trilogy has three books: The Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors. The trilogy is complete.
The Passage is 917 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Passage takes most readers 14 to 20 hours to finish.
The Passage is a standalone novel by Jean M. Auel, not part of a series.
The Passage is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
