How long does it take to read The Shelters of Stone?
The Shelters of Stone by Jean M. Auel takes about 15 hours 15 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Book 5 of Earth's Children hexalogy
Previous: The Plains of Passage Next: The Land of Painted Caves
About 15 hours 15 minutes
A long haul
First published 2001. 832 pages, about 228,800 words.
31 days (about 5 weeks) at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 25 hours 25 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 15 hours 15 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 9 hours 32 minutes |
The page count is the median across 49 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Shelters of Stone opens as Ayla and Jondalar, along with their animal friends, Wolf, Whinney, and Racer, complete their epic journey across Europe and are greeted by Jondalar's people: the Zelandonii. The people of the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii fascinate Ayla. Their clothes, customs, artifacts, even their homes formed in great cliffs of vertical limestone are a source of wonder to her. And in the woman Zelandoni, the spiritual leader of the Ninth Cave (and the one who initiated Jondalar into the Gift of Pleasure), she meets a fellow healer with whom to share her knowledge and skills. But as Ayla and Jondalar prepare for the formal mating at the Summer Meeting, there are difficulties. Not all the Zelandonii are welcoming. Some fear Ayla's unfamiliar ways and abhor her relationship with those they call flatheads and she calls Clan. Some even oppose her mating with Jondalar, and make their displeasure known. Ayla has to call on all her skills, intelligence, knowledge, and instincts to find her way in this complicated society, to prepare for the birth of her child, and to decide whether she will accept new challenges and play a significant role in the destiny of the Zelandonii. Jean Auel is at her very best in this superbly textured creation of a prehistoric society. The Shelters of Stone is a sweeping story of love and danger, with all the wonderful detail based on meticulous research that makes her novels unique. It is a triumphant continuation of the Earth's Children saga that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear. And it includes an amazing rhythmic poem that describes the birth of Earth's Children and plays its own role in the narrative of The Shelters of Stone.
Subjects: Ayla (Fictitious character), Fiction, Prehistoric peoples, Glacial epoch, Préhistoire, Romans, nouvelles
