My Family and Other Animals

Description

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. 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. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Gerald Durrell was a naturalist, author, media personality, conservationist and founder of both the internationally renowned Jersey Zoo and what is now known as the Durrell Wildlife Preservation Trust. A passionate and inspiring advocate of the need for the conservation of animals and plants and their habitats, he was also a brilliant storyteller. Though he had almost no formal education he became a prolific writer, publishing numerous articles and thirty-seven books including Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods, before his death in 1995, aged seventy.

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 *