ABBEY’S BOOKSELLER PICK —— The Durrell family, what a truly eccentric lot you are! This wonderful book, part memoir, part travelogue, is a beloved classic for so many reasons. Amongst the glorious sunshine radiating from the page we meet the Durrell's, an English family attempting to adapt, not always successfully, to a new life in 1930's Corfu. Adding to the general mayhem we have the author's ever-growing menagerie of wild animals including my personal favourite, Achilles the tortoise. I challenge anyone to read about the escapades of Achilles the tortoise without laughing out loud! A sunny delight from beginning to end! Siân McNabney
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The trilogy that inspired ITV's six part television series The Durrells. Available in a single edition for the first time in The Corfu Trilogy.
Three classic tales of childhood on an island paradise:
My Family and Other Animals;
Birds, Beasts and Relatives;
The Garden of the Gods.
Just before the Second World War the Durrell family decamped to the glorious, sun-soaked island of Corfu where the youngest of the four children, ten-year-old Gerald, discovered his passion for animals: toads and tortoises, bats and butterflies, scorpions and octopuses. Through glorious silver-green olive groves and across brilliant-white beaches Gerry pursued his obsession ...causing hilarity and mayhem in his ever-tolerant family.
Durrell's memories of those enchanted days gave rise to these three classic tales, loved by generations of adults and children alike.
'He has an uncanny knack of discovering human as well as animal eccentrics' Sunday Telegraph
'A delightful book full of simple, well-known things: cicadas in the olive groves, lamp fishing at night, the complexities of fish and animals - but, above all, childhood moulded by these things' New York Times