Son of a Trickster
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
the bukowski agency INTERNATIONAL HOT LIST London Book Fair 2016 For excerpts and further information, please visit www.bukowskiagency.com THE LAST NEANDERTHAL a novel by Claire Cameron 80,000 words / Final manuscript due March 2016 A RIVETING DRAMA ABOUT THE PERILS OF MOTHERHOOD AT THE END OF THE NEANDERTHAL ERA — AND IN OUR OWN: THE FIRST BOOK IN A TRILOGY The Last Neanderthal follows the story of the last family of Neanderthals through their final year of life, after a hard winter when their numbers are low. Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and anticipating mating at the yearly salmon run. Through hunting accidents, animal attacks, old age, and disease, their numbers dwindle until Girl is left alone to care for a foundling named Runt. In their quest to find family, they face starvation in the coming winter storms. Girl has one final chance to stop her people from becoming extinct through continuing to breed. Alternating with Girl’s story is a contemporary drama about a young, pregnant anthropologist who has discovered the bones of Girl. What links these characters over the millennia is their experience of early motherhood, and the extremes to which it can drive young mothers. The novel integrates the relatively new notions that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens co-existed, and that they were a lot more like us than we have been led to believe. When under extreme stress, both women behave in Photo: Katrina Afonso remarkably similar ways. In a tale as harrowing as it is hopeful, Claire Cameron explores the dark, often taboo corners of women’s lives. Her novel includes unprecedented, vivid descriptions of the experience of pregnancy and childbirth. Claire Cameron’s reimagining of Neanderthals is buttressed by recent scientific discoveries. They are no longer seen as a primitive people who lost out to humans, but rather as one of our species, with a brain capacity 10% larger than ours, who managed to survive several hundred thousand years longer than we have so far. Many people have inherited up to 4% of their DNA from Neanderthals. Praise for Claire Cameron’s bestseller The Bear • Longlisted for the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction “The Bear had me up all night, and when I finally put it down I knew that I wouldn’t forget Anna and her little brother Stick for a long time. Claire Cameron is an absolute master in letting us feel grief and loss by never using those words. The ending is very moving and offers us real consolation at the same time.” — HERMAN KOCH, author of The Dinner “A tender, terrifying, poignant ride. Hang on.” — OPRAH.COM “A gripping survival thriller… [an] agonizing odyssey of loss and being lost also has humour. The book’s anguished yet hopeful ending provides a touching terminus for Anna and Stick’s journey to adulthood. This expertly crafted novel could do for camping what Jaws did for swimming.” — PEOPLE CLAIRE CAMERON’s first novel was the taut thriller The Line Painter. Her RIGHTS SOLD second novel, The Bear, about two small children lost in the bush after their US: Little, Brown, January 2017 parents are killed by a bear, became a #1 national bestseller in Canada and was Canada: Doubleday, January 2017 sold in eight territories. It was longlisted for the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Netherlands: Cargo/De Bezige Bij Fiction. Claire’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe & Mail, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Rumpus. She is a staff writer at See also www.claire-cameron.com The Millions. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons. THE LAST NEANDERTHAL AN EXCERPT IT WAS THE WARMTH THAT GIRL WOULD REMEMBER. The night, the specific one that she often thought about later, the one that turned out to be among the last they had together, had been filled with warmth. Spring was in the night air, though the ground was still hard with frost. Cold nipped at exposed skin. When they slept, they were the body of the family. That is how they thought of themselves together, as one body that lived and breathed. The forms curled into each other in a tangle, the curve of a belly rested up against the small of a back, a leg draped over a hip and a cold set of toes found heat in the crook of an arm. As the sun turned its face away, they were all exhausted from the work that came with spring. For once, there had been no nighttime stories, talk, and laughs — though when they had all settled, Him, the oldest brother, issued a tremendous fart. It sounded like it could have split a log with the force. Runt replied with a messy blow of his lips to the back of his hand. Bent laughed, just once and Girl let a smile curl to her lips but was too tired for more. Big Mother said, “Hum.” And then it was quiet in the hut, heavy breathing, slow. Deep in the middle of the pile of bodies lay Girl. She usually slept soundly through the first sleep — when they woke for a few hours and the bodies got up to pee, drink water, talk or play in some way, and then went back to bed — but that night she woke too early and stretched out her cramped arm. Under her hand was the warmth of Wildcat. Big Mother had shooed him away to the edge of the nest. The sneaky cat had waited and crawled in once he heard Big Mother was asleep. It wasn’t hard for any of them to tell when she nodded off. They only had to listen for the even whistle of the air in her big nose. Wildcat was grey with pointed black tips on his ears. He was a forest wildcat, which looks much like a modern domestic cat but larger, more robust and with a thicker matt of fur. A set of black rings ran up the length of his tail. He made a single chirp, a sound he had trained Girl to know, and moved in to cuddle up to her. He rubbed his head and ears against hers. She made a faint chirp back. They were good friends and Wildcat was the softest thing she knew. Girl scratched at a flea that was attempting an escape from her armpit. She ran her sleepy fingers across the skin to try and flick it off. A shift and a slight grunt and she couldn’t reach. A moment later a thick finger pressed on her back. It skimmed across the blade and pushed. It was her brother Him, she knew from the feel of the rough skin on the tip of his finger. A pinch and a pop and the bug body crushed between his teeth. Girl didn’t say thank you. There was no need. It was built into all the times Him had picked a flea or louse from her skin in his sleep. Each night she would do the same for Him. Words could be empty. For them, it was the return of a gesture that held meaning. And then it was quiet. Girl sighed and fell back and became part of the tangle of bodies again. The protective layer of bone and muscle blurred. The edges of their bodies melted to the warmth until they joined. THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY LTD. 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202 Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.bukowskiagency.com SON OF A TRICKSTER a novel by Eden Robinson 86,000 words / Manuscript available March 2016 A RETURN TO THE TERRITORY OF MONKEY BEACH — THE DARK AND WACKY AGONY OF ABORIGINAL ADOLESCENTS Son of a Trickster combines aboriginal belief systems and severely dysfunctional family dynamics with fantasy, horror, and edgy, mordant humour in an unorthodox coming-of-age story. One of seventeen-year-old Jared Martin’s grandmothers insists that he is the son of Wee’git the Trickster, that dangerous shape-shifter who looks innocent but wreaks havoc. His other grandmother insists that “If you weren’t your dad’s and your momma tried to pass you off as his, I’d have slit her throat and left her in a ditch to die like a dog.” Jared’s far-northern west-coast Native community is closing in on him: his mom’s psycho ex-boyfriend, Death Threat, tries to kill him; Jared is beaten senseless for his weed, essential to the cookie business with which he supports his father, who plays him for all he is worth; his mom takes up with a biker who moves in along with his pit bull, Baby Killer. “The world is hard. You have to be harder.” That’s Jared’s mother’s favorite saying. When he starts seeing strange apparitions, at first he thinks it has to be the weed that is causing them. But Jared is about to Photo: Mark Raynes Roberts find out some hard truths about himself and his family: these supernatural creatures are hell-bent on revenge against him. The world is hard. Now Jared has to be harder. Praise for Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach “Eden Robinson has written a great book. Tough, tender, and fierce. Monkey Beach is a valuable addition to North American literature.” — SHERMAN ALEXIE “Beautifully written and haunting, this is an impressive debut.” — THE TIMES, UK “Monkey Beach is far more than a novel of psychological transformation, though it is that.