Books like People of the Longhouse — picked by fans

Grounded in historical fact, The Orenda (The Magic) tells the story of Jesuit missionaries caught up in the war between the Wendats (Hurons) and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) living on the shores of Lake Huron in the mid-1600s. It’s a very dark book, with its depictions of ritual torture not for the squeamish, but it perfectly captures the time and culture of two very different civilizations, grappling to understand one another. Bowden does an excellent job of capturing the thoughts and outlook of the Wendat war chief Bird, and the French missionaries struggling to Christianize his village.

I loved this book because it helped me to understand the Indians’ way of thinking and their outlook on the world.

I read it in high school, again in college, and still again (twice) as an adult, once aloud to my 3 young daughters over 3 weeks at bedtime. For me, it is the most powerful, frontier-themed American novel out there. 

 I love a novel that educates me and tells me things I am surprised I didn’t know because I should have, in beautifully constructed sentences.

The dialogue carries its characters so naturally that it is as if you are speaking with them yourself at your main room table in your 18th-century frontier home in Pennsylvania.

Largely forgotten now, this was a huge bestseller when it was published in 1978. Based on stories drawn from the Winter Count of the Lakota Sioux (a record of pictographs depicting notable events of the year), this novel tells the story of two Sioux families living on the Great Plains prior to the arrival of white settlers.

Running 1009 pages, Hanta Yo is surely one of the most singular books in all of literature in that author Hill worked with a Sioux elder to translate her manuscript into the Siouan language and then back into English. I love the book because it offers a deep dive into the thoughts of the Sioux people and their way of life. Only at the end of the book do they encounter the troubles attendant to the white culture.

This fictional account of the life of an English fur trader is a sentimental favorite for me out of my respect for historian Charles Cleland.

Cleland tells the story of Alexander Henry who was captured by the Odawa Indians during the attack on Fort Michillimackinac in 1763. Henry lived among the Indians through the seasons, giving an eye-witness account of their lives as hunter-gatherers. Cleland is better as a historian than a novelist, but this is still a fun read and would also be a good book on any Young Adult list.

The first thing I love about this book is the very unusual use of 2nd person: “You live in a cave with your parents.” The child in this story loves exploring and using his imagination. Everyone else is busy with the job of surviving. The child sees shapes in the clouds and wonders why no one else can see what he sees. One night, without thinking, he takes a stick and draws on the cave walls. Now everyone can see what he sees, and it is the first-ever drawing. Everyone is amazed by it, thinks it is magic, and it is! The ability to use our imaginations to create art is magic, and it is what the author has done in this book, inspired by the real first drawing.

From her earliest years, Sutcliff knew firsthand what it was to live with and surmount painful disability. She understood what it was to be ‘the other’—to be looking from the outside on those able to live ‘normal’ lives. It is not surprising then that many of her stories include main characters who powerfully prove you do not need to be able-bodied to triumph over life. Set in the British Bronze age, this novel is one of those stories. Dem wants to take his place as a warrior of his tribe but must kill a wolf single-handedly to claim his warrior’s scarlet cloak. How can kill his wolf when he was born with a withered arm? With great sensitivity, skill, and prose often close to poetry, Sutcliff brings the Bronze age and its people alive in this wonderfully told story.  

This was one of those books that as I got past the halfway point I became sad as I realised I was heading towards the ending.

Set in prehistory, this book follows a young apprentice shaman making his way in a small hunter-gatherer band. I've never read a book that does such a good job of helping me live in my mind outside of our modern civilsation and with something approaching the view of the rest of the living world that our ancestors may have had.

The Earth’s Children series fully immersed me in Stone Age Europe, thanks to Jean M. Auel’s nerd-level research. But what hooked me was her protagonist: Ayla, a courageous, spiritually gifted, neurodivergent genius. Though Ayla’s a white Cro-magnon, and I’m a Latina Homo sapiens, I relate to this fish out of water.

In this book, she’s wildly different from the Neanderthals who adopt her, echoing my own family experience. Ayla’s unique problem-solving skills also set her apart, sending her careening between loneliness and leadership. What excites me most about her journey is that the demands of the Ice Age give her more opportunities to explore her potential than many modern women. I recommend starting with Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla’s origin story, which stands on its own. 

I love the main character, the strongest woman in literature, who, in late Paleolithic times, literally invents the modern world. She is strong but thinks herself weak. She is beautiful but thinks herself ugly. She circumvents and overcomes every instance of adversity thrown her way. I want to be her, and the book permits me to wear her shoes.

I have been highly influenced by Jean Auel’s storytelling, especially the graphic scenes of Ayla’s loss of innocence, growth into sexuality, and descriptions of lust, love, and completion.

This book is not erotica, yet the love scenes are the best I’ve ever read and are a roadmap to create tension and heat in my writing. With her influence, my audience laughs, cries, and cheers their way through my books.

It is a commonplace observation about the history of archaeology that the Three Age System, along with the discovery of high human antiquity, forms one of the two great defining ‘events’ of prehistoric archaeology in the nineteenth century.

Generations of students have been introduced to the discipline (and the nature of its distinctive contribution to the writing of human history) through re-telling of foundation stories about antiquity, and our capacity to order and measure it.

Rowley-Conwy’s excellent book significantly recasts the first of these great foundation narratives and teaches us much about the continuing importance of those narratives.