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

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In November’s C&TH Book Club , Belinda Bamber talks to Katherine Rundell about her new book, The Golden Mole, a gilt-edged treasury of animals that invites readers to reopen their eyes to the endangered glories of the natural world. Katherine has also just won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non Fiction 2022 for her previous book, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, a biography of the poet. Dolphins whistle to their young in the womb for months before the birth (Image: Wullie Marr/DC Thomson) 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 can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be enchanted, fascinated, & deeply concerned by this bestiary of the world’s most extraordinary & endangered animals. KR: I love children’s books for the huge possibilities they offer: for vivid writing, wild imaginings. Children’s writing necessitates its own particular discipline, and I find that discipline a delight and a challenge: you need you to distil enormous ideas – ideas about our most vulnerable heart – into something tight and memorable. I think that challenge appealed to me: and the books I read as a child remain some of the most important to me, even now. 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. Main image courtesy of Nina Subin Interview With Katherine Rundell, Author Of The Golden Mole – C&TH Book Club

A literary wonder

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. IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES: SIGNED EXCLUSIVE INDIE UK FIRST EDITION HARDCOVER W/ CHAPTER SAMPLER AND BOOKMARK Kathleen Jamie is a poet and editor of “Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland” (Canongate) KR: I was recently part of a Royal Society of Literature committee that involved, in the search of Fellows from further afield, reading a lot of literature in translation, so I have just recently fallen in love with the novels of Yoko Ogawa and The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

The Golden Mole. And Other Living Treasure: Katherine Rundell - both versions signed by Katherine Rundell

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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.”

My friend [the novelist] Eleanor Catton told me to read this; I am so grateful to her. The book, which contains 11 essays about politics, motherhood, vocation, writing, shines with a stark clarity; its boldness is in its simplicity. The title essay, The Little Virtues, argues that children should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones – “not caution but courage and a contempt for danger… not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.” I loved it more than any essays I’ve read for years. 2. Film

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When it comes to what we should do, however, things get a bit woolly. After a typically vivid account of seahorse courtship and reproduction, Rundell urges us to “remember the seahorse” every morning and “scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep” or, a bit more practically, to “refuse to eat anything that is taken from the ocean by overexploitative nonselective fishing”. Elsewhere, she makes the rather vague suggestion that we “urgently seek out ways to aid child nutrition” in impoverished countries, so that people there are not forced to hunt endangered creatures. It is a pity that this element of the book is so thin and impractical. Yet Rundell is incapable of writing a dull sentence and it could hardly be bettered as an exuberant celebration of everything from bats, crows and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats BB: ‘There is nothing like climbing a drainpipe at night to remind you just how dark dark can be’ is a line from Rooftoppers. Do you like to live dangerously?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. 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.

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