Part of the trilogy that inspired the hit show on PBS Masterpiece Theater, The Durrells in Corfu, Fauna and Family, also known as The Garden of the Gods, is the third in Durrell's Corfu trilogy that begins with his beloved classic, My Family and Other Animals and continues with Birds, Beasts and Relatives. In his foreword to Fauna and Family, Durrell confessed that in the first two books, "I had left out a number of incidents and characters that I would have liked to have described, and I have attempted to repair this omission in this book . . . I hope that it might give the same pleasure to its readers as apparently its predecessors have done, as for me it portrays a very important part of my life . . . which is a truly happy and sunlit childhood.”
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<p><b>The happy and sunlit childhood of Gerald Durrell, and family, on the Greek island of Corfu. This is how the celebrated wildlife conservation hero got his start.</b><br><br>For the passionate young animal lover, the island in the Ionian Sea was a natural paradise, teeming with strange birds and beasts. As Durrell writes...<br><br> “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 <i>Bootle Bumtrinket</i><i>, 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.”</i><br><br>For fans of the PBS Masterpiece series, <i>The Durrells in Corfu</i>, and fans of memoirs from a vanished time—including attitudes very different from our own—this is a book to treasure.</p>
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