Fauna and Family

The inspiration for the PBS Masterpiece series, The Durrells in Corfu: A naturalist’s childhood adventures with animals—and humans—on a Greek island.

For a passionate animal lover like young Gerald Durrell, the island in the Ionian Sea was a natural paradise, teeming with strange birds and beasts. As he writes . . .

“To me, this blue kingdom was a treasure house of strange beasts which I longed to collect and observe, and at first it was frustrating for I could only peck along the shoreline like some forlorn seabird, capturing the small fry in the shallows and occasionally being tantalized by something mysterious and wonderful cast up on the shore. But then I got my boat, the good ship Bootle Bumtrinket, and so the whole of this kingdom was opened up for me, from the golden red castles of rock and their deep pools and underwater caves in the north to the long, glittering white sand dunes lying like snowdrifts in the south.”

The final entry in Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy, Fauna and Family shows what life was like for a child in a different time and a different culture just before World War II. It also sheds light on the man who would one day become an iconic wildlife preservationist.

Previously published as The Garden of the Gods

“[Durrell's] writing is nimble, witty and irreverent, warm but not remotely sentimental.” —Los Angeles Times