My Family and Other Animals

Gerald Durrell was ten years old when his widowed mother moved the family to the Greek island of Corfu, and the five years that followed were, he later insisted, the happiest of his life. My Family and Other Animals is the memoir of those years: the animals he collected (scorpions, geckos, owls, dogs, rose beetles, a pigeon, various tortoises), the lessons he received from an unorthodox tutor, and the continuous comedy of his family’s attempts to maintain some semblance of English respectability in a Mediterranean setting that had other ideas.

Published in 1956 and never out of print, it is one of the most purely pleasurable memoirs in the English language — funny in every chapter, deeply affectionate about the natural world, and written with a precision of observation that reflects the naturalist Durrell would become. The descriptions of Corfu’s landscape and light remain among the finest in travel writing.

Essential reading for anyone who loves nature, comedy, or the Mediterranean — and the ideal introduction to one of Britain’s most beloved writers. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.