The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. 'Rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson 'A witty, intoxicating paean to Earth's most wondrous creatures.' Observer 'Exquisite and timely.' Maggie O'Farrell ** Shortlisted for the Waterstones and Foyles Book of the Year ** ** Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing ** In The Golden Mole, Katherine Rundell, the award-winning author of Super-Infinite and Impossible Creatures, takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's strangest and most awe-inspiring animals, including pangolins, wombats, lemurs and seahorses. But each of these animals is endangered. And so, this most passionately persuasive and sharply funny book is also an urgent, inspiring clarion call: to treasure and act - to save nature's vanishing wonders, before it is too late. 'Deeply affecting, intimate and wildly funny . . . I loved it.' Edmund de Waal 'A wondrous ode to nature's astonishing beauty - and an elegy for all the life we are in the midst of destroying.' Amia Srinivasan 'An exuberant celebration of everything from bats, crows and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats . . . Rundell is incapable of writing a dull sentence.' Observer 'There is a constant joy in the book . . . A sense throughout of delight and wonder, and a reminder that these emotions also matter - may even save us. This is the point.' New Statesman