Virve Sammalkorpi’s award-winning Children of the Cave (Peirene Press, £12; Tablet price £10.80) interrogates what it means to be human. Set 30 years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, it con­cocts a dark fantasy about an anthropological expedition to north-west Russia in search of a lost tribe. Instead, the explorers discover children with animal traits living in a forest, forced to exist outside civilisation for their own safety. Sammalkorpi raises interesting questions about the demon­isation of the other and the pursuit of knowledge.