It is among my proudest boasts, that I was massive Rundell fan before she became a national treasure. This Irish-language film, based on Claire Keegan’s beautiful novel Foster, has a hush and a precision and a generosity that is remarkable. It was once proposed that storks “wintered on the moon”; we couldn’t have imagined that a mere two centuries later their wings would reveal the key to human fight.

There’s bound to be animals one feels to have been unfairly overlooked, and I would have liked to see her on at least one bird of prey, or declining beetle, or endangered cat. Born in Kent in 1987, author and academic Katherine Rundell grew up in London, Zimbabwe and Belgium. The bone in the mole’s middle ear is so large and hypertrophied that it is immensely sensitive to underground vibrations; waiting under the soil or sand, the golden mole can hear the footsteps up above of birds and lizards; it can distinguish between the footfall of ants and termites. Her latest novel Animal Life, translated by Brian FitzGibbon, blends themes of the natural and human worlds as surprisingly as The Golden Mole.She points out that in Atlanta, Georgia, it is illegal to tie a giraffe to a streetlamp but not “to import a cushion made from a freshly shot giraffe’s head with the eyelashes still attached” because the US will not designate giraffes as endangered.

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. In portraits her face has the expression of one who has seen a great deal and would prefer to burn most of it. But this is a 21st-century bestiary, and rather than trying to slot animals, birds and fish into a Christian worldview, Rundell – author of wondrous children’s books and recently a thrilling biography of John Donne – is arguing urgently for their survival. Not just the Principe scops-owl, native to a West African island with a human population of less than 8,000, but a new type of water shrew in the British Isles.Her award-winning and bestselling books for children have been translated into thirty languages and have multiple awards.

The Golden Mole feels like a medieval bestiary, with its wide-ranging essays (some of which have appeared in the London Review of Books), its gorgeous illustrations by Talya Baldwin, and its invitation to pay attention to creatures that are “so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the edges of the truth”.The page edges are sprayed red and the red boards are stencilled with a design unique to this edition. I know – so many of us, children and adults – use it to calm and distract ourselves: which feels a brittle, difficult way to move through the world: Tiktok and Instagram can eat up your hours but they’re not large enough, not clear enough, not bold or generous enough. Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. Put in front of a television, we learn, “some become fixated on nature programmes, more so than by, for instance, prime minister’s questions”.

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.Wolves get a bad deal: “the very first transformation scene in the work of the Roman poet Ovid is also the grisliest, and one of the earliest fictional accounts of lycanthropy”.