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

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Beyond that, I wanted to choose a mixture of animals with which we are unfamiliar – like, as you say, narwhals (at least one of my friends – a very competent adult in his forties – believed them to be mythical until he read the book) and animals where I could try to offer a fresh take on something you see daily: the aim would be, once you’ve read about crows being able to operate vending machines, or the old English belief in women who could change into hares, you will see them with fresher and sharper eyes. But I think the thing that is most galvanic is the natural world itself, and the increasingly terrifyingly visible truth of its peril. 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.

The “exuberantly declarative” Hawaiian crow, or ‘ alala ̄, is a soul guide, said to accompany the human dead safely into the afterlife. Narwhals were thought to be sea unicorns; their long, sensitive teeth were collected for supposedly magical properties. The animal was, he believed, conceptually untidy: ‘If a painter had chosen to set a human head on a horse’s neck [or] if a lovely woman ended repulsively in the tail of a black fish, could you stifle laughter, friends? These qualities were on prominent display in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne , published earlier this year. Domhildur's exploring her grand aunt's collection of philosophical essays, from the local history of midwifery to the encroaching impact of climate change, which circle around the delicate equilibrium of life.

It was careful and precise with language, grim as well as funny – a sort of Famous Five meets Heart of Darkness – and, crucially, didn’t speak down to its tween readers. Rundell shows us that the human imagination often looks pedestrian next to nature’s real ingenuity; our fairytales can seem like mundane placeholders for more wonderful truths. In 1964, Alberto Simonetta, a professor at the Florence Institute of Zoology, was sifting through the contents of a disused bakery oven in Somalia. There is an obvious danger that a book like this could feel preachy, and leave the reader emotionally flattened by its mawkishness and relentless recitation of downbeat statistics.

Teaming up with the illustrator Talya Baldwin, she has created a paper menagerie of twenty-two exquisite, daunting and vulnerable creatures. There are 21 species, all from Sub-Saharan Africa; as is the way of these things, many of them are named after men.There he meets Mal: a girl from the islands, who is in possession of a flying coat and a baby griffin, and who is being pursued by a killer.

When the French king Charles X was given a giraffe by the ruler of Egypt in 1827, it established a fashion for coiffure à la girafe , as “women smeared their hair with hogs’ lard pomade fragranced with orange flower and jasmine, and wound to resemble the giraffe’s ossicones”. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral - and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language.Signed first edition (First edition, first printing, signed by the author) ** A Sunday Times bestseller **** A Guardian, Spectator, TLS, New Statesman, Daily Mail, Prospect and Telegraph Book of the Year**'Every page sparkles. A joyous catalogue of curiosities that builds into a timely reminder that life on planet is worth our wonder. In fact, learning about how they live in everything from tin cans to coconut halves, she finds: “More and more, in these darker days, I admire resourcefulness. 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. The same era thought bear cubs were born a solid lump of flesh and then licked into bear shape by their mothers.