16-05-2025
Gerald Durrell's autobiography
Published 30 years after his passing, and in his centenary year, Myself & Other Animals should revive interest in naturalist Gerald Durrell's legacy. Jamshedpur-born Durrell's childhood was spent in a wild rapture. Happily for his readers, he never grew up. In 1930, following his father's death, his mother Louisa moved with her four children (including eldest son Lawrence, later another famous writer) to England. But the India-raised Durrells couldn't cope with life there. The family followed Lawrence to Corfu, a Greek island where young Gerald spent an idyllic Mediterranean boyhood among creatures great and small. There he met his natural history mentor, the polymath Theodore Stephanides. These recollections would appear, garnished with saucy humour and serendipity, in the bestselling Corfu Trilogy—My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts and Relatives; and The Garden of the Gods.
