Chosen by July 2012 Guest Editor Caroline Lawrence: "I discovered this as a University student but fell for it as hard as any eleven-year-old. When I came to England to study Classics at Cambridge I bought the unabridged audiobook read by one of my favourite British actors, Nigel Davenport. Listening to him read about sun-drenched Corfu in the 1930s was almost better than my first Greek holiday."
Ten-year-old Gerald doesn't know why his older brothers and sisters complain so much. With snakes in the bath and scorpions on the lunch table, the family home on the Greek island of Corfu is a bit like a zoo so they should feel right at home...Gerald joyfully pursues his interest in natural history in the midsts of an unconventional and chaotic family life - all brilliantly retold in this very funny book.
'Durrell has an uncanny knack of discovering human as well as animal eccentricities' - Sunday Telegraph
Author
About Gerald Durrell
Gerald was born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1925. In 1928 his family returned to England and in 1933 they went to live on the Continent (Europe). Eventually they settled on the island of Corfu, where they lived until 1939. During this time he made a special study of zoology, and kept a large number of the local wild animals as pets. In 1945 he joined the staff of the Whipsnade Park as a student keeper. In 1947 he financed, organized, and led his first animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons. This was followed by a expeditions in 1948 and 1949, this time to British Guiana. He has also made expeditions to Paraguay, Argentina, Sierra Leone, Mauritius, Assam, Mexico, and Madagascar. In 1962 he and his wife went to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya to film a TV series, Two in the Bush. In 1959 he founded the Jersey Zoological Park, of which he is the director, and in 1964 he founded the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust.
