The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this passionately persuasive and sharply funny book, Katherine Rundell tells us how and why. 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.

Rundell is very strong on the tales humans have told about the natural world. We now know that unicorn horns were actually narwhal tusks, that hedgehogs are lactose intolerant, that drinking bats’ blood does not make you invisible. But we are still making mistakes, and we still know very little. Take the Somali golden mole, whose entry on the International Union for Conservation of Nature list says “data deficient” because “we do not know what shares the world with us, and in what numbers”. 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. Kathleen Jamie is a poet and editor of “Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland” (Canongate)

Colourful myths explored and exploded

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. KR: I think there are the things that we’re all, now, aware of: eat less meat; reinvest what money we might have in funds which have divested themselves of fossil fuels; own less; treat domestic flights as the behaviour of the malarially unhinged. Those are important; in part, as the activist Wendell Berry says, as a kind of speech: they assure yourself and those around you that you mean what you say. But it’s primarily a political problem, which will need political answers: we will need governments that believe in global cooperation, that will have the will and purpose and courage to make bold decision for the sake of the future of the planet. 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”. KR: I do! I have several full notebooks, and a cascade of notes on my phone, many of which I’ll never use. Frank Cottrell Boyce, a writer I admire hugely, always says that writers should keep a diary: but that it should be by force limited to a single sentence a day: the most interesting, funniest, saddest thing you heard that day, so that at the end of the year you have 365 interesting sentences. I’m imperfect at keeping up with it, but I love the idea. Often my single sentence will be a note of something I read about the natural world.

Rundell’s sentences are small miracles that charm, like a soft hand on the reader’s cheek. “The first lemur I ever met was female, and she tried to bite me, which was fair, because I was trying to touch her, and because humans have done nothing to recommend themselves to lemurs.”“I once met a half-tame she-wolf… she smelled… of dust and blood. She did not want to meet my eye. Wolves are like the fairy tales they prowl through: wild, and not on any body’s side.” And on, beguilingly, she goes. KR: My next book, which I hope will be out in about a year, will be another children’s novel – I’m working on it now, and I think, after deleting quite a lot of it, and starting again, it’s finally falling into place, and I have that fantastic feeling of something that is, after a lot of false starts, finally taking off. I’ve had a novel for adults for a long time – it’s something I work at in snatched moments, late at night, so I think it won’t happen for a fair few years: but I hope to finish it eventually.

Broadcasts

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. 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. Despite being a firm fiction fan, Chris Deerin stumbled upon a slim volume of essays in 2022 that he can’t stop thinking about. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)KR: In a dream world – I don’t think this will ever happen – I’ve never seen a hummingbird (there are none in Europe: people who think they’ve seen one have usually seen a hummingbird hawk moth) so I would love to go to Cuba to see the Bee Hummingbird – the smallest bird in the world, which weighs less than two grams. They have iridescent throats, and are just five and a half centimetres long – barely the length of a finger. https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/opinion/columnists/5250874/katherine-rundell-books-golden-mole-chris-deerin-opinion/ Copy Link KR: My colleagues at All Souls have always been very generous about my slightly idiosyncratic career!

Rundell’s talents stretch beyond kindling young minds, however. The book that grabbed so much attention last year is entitled Super-Infinite, and is a biography of the English metaphysical poet John Donne, who, across the late 16th and early 17th centuries, also found time to be a lawyer, a naval adventurer who fought beside Raleigh, an MP, a rake, and the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. KR: There are many writers about the environment whose work I love, who write urgently and well about climate change, either directly or indirectly: Wendell Berry, Frantz Fanon, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Greta Thunberg, Marilynne Robinson. But I think the thing that is most galvanic is the natural world itself, and the increasingly terrifyingly visible truth of its peril. For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. The Golden Mole. And Other Living Treasure: Katherine Rundell - both versions signed by Katherine RundellBB: You write in The Golden Mole: ‘We wake in the morning and as we put on our trousers we should remember the seahorse and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep…’ Half the book’s royalties are going to charity, which ones? BB: You’re a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and published an acclaimed book, Super-Infinite, on John Donne this year. Where do your adventure stories for children fit in? BB: Your sense of wonder about the creatures you write about is infectious. Who inspires you in environmental activism? 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. KR: The World Wildlife Fund for land, whose work I’ve admire all my life, and a wonderful small charity called Blue Ventures for the sea.