‘Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures’ by Katherine Rundell.If, you, too, have been intensely concentrating on the presidential election, you may be ready for a shift of focus. Vanishing Treasures, an extraordinary book by Katherine Rundell (originally published under the title The Golden Mole in the UK) lifts readers out of the here and now and invites us to train our eyes on wider horizons.
Rundell is a publishing phenom. Her 2013 middle-grade children’s book Rooftoppers drew inspiration from her own adventures as an undergraduate at Oxford, where she climbed brick walls and scaled drainpipes to take in the views of that “city of dreaming spires” from on high. More recently, Rundell has written Super-Infinite, an acclaimed biography of the metaphysical poet John Donne, as well as a bestselling fantasy novel, called Impossible Creatures.