A Three Dog Life Abigail Thomas (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £9.99) Australian Aborigines sleep with their dogs for warmth on cold nights, the coldest being a "three dog night". Thomas's three dogs not only keep her warm, they make her laugh, particularly in the early morning when she wakes to discover warm doggy breath on her face and two eyes staring at her with such intensity that laughter is the only possible response. This is an honest, powerful and poignant account of life following her husband's accident, when he was left brain-injured by a car accident. The dogs help her reshape a life of chaos, and provide her with companionship and love. As alpha dog she glories in the fact that dogs accept her role and are never in a bad mood over something said at breakfast. She enjoys the fact that dogs never sniff at the husks of old conversations or conduct autopsies on weekends that go wrong.

An Otter on the Aga Rex Harper (Headline, £18.99) "Are you going to cook it?" Harper asks as his wife places a baby otter into the lower oven of the Aga. Of course she wasn't. The oven provided just the right amount of warmth to revive a fragile baby otter discovered alone on the river bank suffering from hypothermia.

Within three weeks, the otter had migrated from the Aga to a comfortable box in a corner of the kitchen and barely recognisable as the shivering, sodden ball of fur that had been rescued from the river. This delightful story is one of a collection of tales revolving round an animal sanctuary in Cornwall which became a magnet for an extraordinary array of animal waifs and strays. An inspiring and poignant book which will touch (and sometimes break) the hearts of animal lovers everywhere.