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

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

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

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None of the creatures considered is extinct, they all remain our companions in our long evolutionary journey. As Rundell says of a certain pangolin she once knew: “Her loveliness makes other forms of loveliness – diamonds, rubies, wrists bedecked with Rolexes – look like a con. In portraits her face has the expression of one who has seen a great deal and would prefer to burn most of it. It’s been a prolific year for The Golden Mole’s author, Katherine Rundell, who last month became the youngest ever winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for Super-Infinite, her biography of the Renaissance poet John Donne.

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”. Her books for children include Rooftoppers (2013), The Wolf Wilder (2015) and The Explorer (2017), winner of the Costa children’s book award. The wombat, cute as it is, can outrun Usain Bolt, and can attack backwards, crushing its enemy with its bone-hard backside.And then there is the 21st species, the Somali golden mole; the Bigfoot of golden moles, which has never been seen alive. BB: You’re a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and published an acclaimed book, Super-Infinite, on John Donne this year. Many of the dishes have long, thin enoki mushrooms, like small gifts in a bowl of soup; and the aubergine with fresh chopped chilli is wonderful. It’s told through the eyes of Domhildur, a midwife who has just delivered her one thousand nine hundred and twenty-second baby in the days before Christmas as a deadly storm approaches the island.

But I think the thing that is most galvanic is the natural world itself, and the increasingly terrifyingly visible truth of its peril. We know very little about any golden mole, but about the Somali golden mole we know nothing at all; not what colour it is, nor whether it’s quietly abundant in some small and as yet unsurveyed patch of land, nor if the owl ate the last one.

She “did not believe in love at first sight”, she tells us, until she was introduced to a pangolin at a wildlife project in Zimbabwe. A family of barn owls had been living in it, and inside one of the pellets, Simonetta found the assorted bones of a golden mole; including the ‘right ramus of the lower jaw’.

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. Exploring how she blended art and science, poetry and natural history through writings from Pliny, Aristotle, TS Eliot, Hemingway, Russian fairy tales and Greek mythology to inspire her readers about the beauty of the natural world and the fragility of its existence.Even more disturbingly, Rundell argues that extinction is “not just happening because of our inertia: it’s incentive-driven” – through a ghastly process known as “extinction speculation”. By title alone The Golden Mole sounds as though it would be a charming book, a cross between a treasury and a bestiary.



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