In the grand tradition of Watership Down - a saga of the great and gentle ones.
It is a harsh but beautiful world - a remote fastness of shining tundra,
rimmed by ice and sea and mountain. Silverhair and her kind have lived
here from the earliest Rememberings, when Kilukpuk's children first
parted some for the jungle, some into the sea, and some into the rock
and ice.
Hear their song! For they are the last of the woolly
mammoths, the great, shaggy gentle ones whose bones have greened
Earth's grasses through the Long Years, for fifty million springs. Hear
their story.
Silverhair is filled with the dreams of youth,
and the warmth of Lop-ear's child growing in her belly. But even as her
life begins, her world is ending around her. A new menace, more vicious
than wolf or bear, is descending upon the snowlands - a two-legged
creature that kills for joy, and fouls the Earth for greed. Silverhair
and the matriarch, Owlheart, must escape across the glacial torrents,
beyond the saw-toothed mountains. They seek help and find it in
unexpected sources, including the distant cousins who long ago found
their destiny in the green arms of the sea, and from an enemy: an
ice-faced menace known as... the Lost.
Stephen Baxter, one of
today's most acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy, now
turns his celebrated talents to a tale that has never before been told
or even imagined. Silverhair begins a three-part saga - at once
thrilling, heartwarming, and tragic - of a small band of mammoth
survivors on a remote arctic island, and what happens when they are
discovered by a clever and unpredictable animal they call the Lost.
Silverhair is a story for every age, a tale to remember as long as the footfalls
of the great and gentle ones still echo in the shadow of the
glaciers - forever.