Grimly gripping tale of girlhood

tale a strongly beating contemporary heart. These tales gently repopulate Kipling’s jungle with the diversity and politics of now – fleshing out and adding female characters, including Mother Wolf, Raksha and Bagheera’s sister, with whom the panther was imprisoned in a palace as a young cub, and the tale of their escape together from their captors. Above all, though, Rundell makes us feel the jungle and the characters within it, capturing its smells and sounds.

The Legend of Sally Jones by Jakob Wegelius (Pushkin, £12.99) is a rich graphic novel prequel to The Murderer’s Ape. Best for older readers, though the drawings and narrative detail are absorbing for almost any age, it’s a thing of beauty and baroque intricacy, as it tells the tale of Sally Jones from birth in the jungle, how she is caught by Belgian officers during an illegal hunting expedition, bought by an ivory merchant who smuggles her onto a passenger liner by disguising her as a baby in a pram, purchased then by a widow who was an animal lover who teaches her to be a burglar – and that’s just the beginning of a book with a moral heart and a twist on every wonderful, though often dark, page.