My Family and Other Animals (Macmillan Collector s Library)

Description

This book is an autobiographical account of five years in the childhood of naturalist Gerald Durrell when he lived with his family lived on the island of Corfu. Apart from Gerald (the youngest) and Larry (Lawrence Durrell, the novelist), the family comprised their widowed mother, the gun-mad Leslie, and diet-obsessed sister Margo together with Roger the dog. The procession of animals includes toads, and tortoises, bats and butterflies scorpions and geckos, ladybirds, glow-worms, octopuses and rose-beetles, Ulysses, the Scops owl, Quasimodo the pigeon, the puppies Widdle and Puke, and of course the magpies. The family is fiercely protected by their taxi-driver friend Spiro, and Gerald is mentored by the polymath Dr Theodore Stephanides who provides his education in natural history.

With an Introduction by Peter Olney.

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector s Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector s Library are books to love and treasure.

As a self-described "champion of small uglies," English writer 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.