I wrote a little list for the Guardian’s “Top Ten Books” feature, delving into some of my favourite writing about how we interact with the animals with which we share the world. Featuring Ursula K. Le Guin, James Herriot, Karen Joy Fowler, Russell Hoban and others.

Our interactions with animals are many and various, ranging from devotion to a pet goldfish, say, to the raw violence that takes place in a dogfighting ring or factory farm. The relationships I’m drawn to, and have chosen to highlight below, are intimate, enigmatic and mostly benign, characterised by hopeful longing for communion with minds and bodies like but unlike our own.