The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure: 'A rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson

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A wondrous ode to nature's astonishing beauty – and an elegy for all the life we are in the midst of destroying. This is a book filled with love and hope and whiskers and wings, by turns ravishing and devastating. No one sings the praises of the world quite like Katherine Rundell."

Dolphins whistle to their young in the womb for months before the birth (Image: Wullie Marr/DC Thomson)Events of recent weeks may have encouraged some to think about longevity and constancy. But when we value “living memory” we seem able only to measure it in human terms. To be truly long-memoried on this Earth, you would probably have to be a Greenland shark. As Katherine Rundell reports, a Greenland shark presently cruising the dark depths of the Arctic Ocean might have been doing so even as the plague swept London. Its great-great-grandparents may have known Julius Caesar, so to speak. It takes 150 years for a female to reach sexual maturity. “For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above ground the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.” They also smell strongly of pee. KR: My colleagues at All Souls have always been very generous about my slightly idiosyncratic career! Kate Nic Chonaonaigh, left, and Catherine Clinch in The Quiet Girl. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

By title alone The Golden Mole sounds as though it would be a charming book, a cross between a treasury and a bestiary. The subtitle is indeed “And Other Living Treasure”. At first glance its structure, short essays each prefaced with a beautiful, grey-on-gold illustration by Talya Baldwin, might suggest a children’s wildlife encyclopaedia or a coffee-table Christmas gift book. Rundell is indeed a children’s author and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal; the book is indeed charming. She has mastered a sprightly, enthused tone for her essays, which come at their subjects from unexpected angles. She is good with the arresting opening line: “It was, perhaps, a hermit crab that ate Amelia Earhart.” “Hares have always been thought magic.” There is much lore and plenty of what the Americans call “fun facts”. Take hermit crabs, for example. Coconut hermit crabs are land crabs, so called because they can prise open a coconut. They can live to be 100 and grow to a metre across, “too large to fit in a bathtub, exactly the right size for a nightmare”. Fun facts, perhaps, but her purpose is serious. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Dolphins whistle to their young in the womb for months before the birth, and for two weeks afterward – the others in the pod remain quiet so as not to confuse the unborn calf as it learns its mother’s call. I haven’t yet read Super-Infinite. But, early in the new year, as I was scanning my piles of unread books for something diverting, I noticed that a publisher had sent me another work of Rundell’s. As 2022 drew to a close, I noticed that many of the “best of the year” lists repeated one particular author’s name and book.Katherine Rundell is a scholar, a fabulous writer and a born enthusiast. These qualities were on prominent display in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne , published earlier this year. But she is equally famous as an award-winning children’s author, whose books such as The Wolf Wilder are shot through with a deep sense of the strange and often disturbing beauty of other animals. The Golden Mole is a celebration of 22 species, each of which is either endangered or “contains a subspecies that is endangered”. In presenting us with a world “populated with such strangenesses and imperilled astonishments”, The Golden Mole also wants us to be angry and committed to conservation. Here, Rundell makes a number of powerful points. The age-old search for (almost certainly nonexistent) “natural aphrodisiacs” is “evidence of great human vulnerability, and enough stupidity to destroy entire ecosystems”. Several species would be far safer if we could just abandon our silly faith in the magical powers of tiger claws, rhino horns or the flesh of the coconut crab.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Our desire to get close to the world’s wild creatures has often done them very little good,” writes Rundell. “Every species in this book is endangered or contains a subspecies that is endangered, because there is almost no creature in the world, now, for which that it not the case.” Despite being a firm fiction fan, Chris Deerin stumbled upon a slim volume of essays in 2022 that he can’t stop thinking about. BB: Your sense of wonder about the creatures you write about is infectious. Who inspires you in environmental activism?

KR: If enough people buy it to persuade a publisher to buy it, I’d love to! It is, I think, my favourite form of writing: it’s the closest my work gets to pure delight.