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Reindeer Moon may well come to be regarded as the supreme contemporary novel of our prehistory. It opens up corridors to the imagination that lead us back toward the long echoes of our distant human past, and its characters, as vivid as any alive, live on in the mind long after the book has been set down.

Reindeer Moon is the first novel, but not the first book, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of classic anthropological accounts of hunters and gatherers. Yanan, its headstrong heroine, lived twenty thousand years ago near Woman Lake in central Siberia among places you will not find on any modern map. Yanan, only thirteen when her story begins, is passionate and courageous, and her companions--hunters of deer, gatherers of roots and twigs, shamans, babies at the breast--are all, like her, bound to the harsh realities of hunger, cold, death by violence or childbirth, and the cycles of love and jealousy, of marriage and kinship. As Yanan recounts the terrible adventures of her brief life she departs, from time to time, on spirit journeys that evoke the lives of animals with extraordinary intimacy, for Yanan's fate is like ours but conceived in different terms.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's first novel, an international best seller, drew praise of the highest kind. "[Reindeer Moon] deserves a place of distinction, right at the head of the line, of the great series of 'historical' novels," wrote the late Joseph Campbell. It was published in fourteen languages and won a Hemingway Award Citation.

The Animal Wife may well rank by its side, for this new novel shares half a world with its predecessor. Whereas Reindeer Moon saw the life of prehistoric humankind through the eyes of Yanan, a gifted but rebellious woman, The Animal Wife, which takes place a few years later, is narrated by young Kori, a marvelous hunter, as prodigious in the chase as he is ignorant of the ways of women. Yet Kori too is confined by his society, interdependent as it is with the world of animals.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's greatest talent is to identify with, to become, an animal, as a great hunter does; and animals provide Kori's people with nearly all their religious and spiritual symbols, nearly all their tools and weapons, nearly everything, except desire. Kori is full of desire and aspiration--the aspiration to be as great a hunter as his father, Swift; the desire for a woman of his own.

Few readers of this book will ever forget the scene in which Kori, hunting in strange country for the site of a mysterious campfire, finds, swimming in a pond, what he imagines to be an animal but which turns out to be a naked woman; acting on instinct only, he instantly abducts her and makes her his wife.