My Family and Other Animals: Gerald Durrell: 21 (Macmillan Collector's Library, 21) - Hardcover

Durrell, Gerald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1909621986 ISBN 13: 9781909621985

Publisher: Macmillan Collector's Library, 2016

Synopsis

The inspiration behind ITV's hit family drama, The Durrells.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an afterword by Peter Olney, former Keeper of Birds at the London Zoo, and a distinguished ornithologist who was awarded the Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal in 2003.

My Family and Other Animals is Gerald Durrell's hilarious account of five years in his childhood spent living with his family on the island of Corfu. With snakes, scorpions, toads, owls and geckos competing for space with one bookworm brother and another who's gun-mad, as well as an obsessive sister, young Gerald has an awful lot of natural history to observe. This richly detailed, informative and riotously funny memoir of eccentric family life is a twentieth-century classic.

About this title

Review

As a self-described "champion of small uglies," Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) devoted his life to writing and the preservation of wildlife, from the Mauritius pink pigeon to the Rodriques fruit bat. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the Greek island of Corfu, but ended up as a delightful account of his family's experiences that were, according to him, "rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas".

As a 10-year-old boy, Gerry left England for Corfu with "all those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids". Durrell's descriptions of his family and its many eccentric hangers-on (he stresses that "all the anecdotes about the island and the islanders are absolutely true") are highly entertaining, as is the procession of toads, scorpions, geckos, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, the puppies Widdle and Puke, and the Magenpies. This is a lovely book. --Christine Buttery

Review

I do assure you, the world needs Durrell. -- Sir David Attenborough

The enduring joy of the book resides in reading about a bohemian family when you have never been part of one yourself . . . One night I laughed so hard I slipped out of bed, whacking my head on the nightstand -- Meg Rosoff, The Guardian

He [Durrell] produced a literary masterpiece that remains the finest evocation of paradise ever written. He built a paradise based on his own beliefs of what a zoo should be. And after his death in 1995, he left behind an organisation that works to restore a touch of paradise to humanity and to everything else that lives. -- Simon Barnes, Independent

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan Collector's Library
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1909621986
• ISBN 13: 9781909621985
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 376