SLoB is turning 1! To celebrate, Sophie and Jonty re-read one of their all time favorites, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.

My Family and Other Animals (1956) is the beloved, hilarious, brilliant chronicle of a childhood idyll — which is also a series of comic disasters — set on the Ionian Greek Island of Corfu.

The memoir is the first part of a trilogy that includes Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods and Gerald Durrell wrote dozens of other books about his life as a naturalist and conversationist. 

But My Family was his break-out hit that made him into a celebrity-animal whisperer, and royalties from the book allowed him to establish the famous Jersey Zoo for wildlife conservation. Long before the zoo, however, came the celebrity animals of the Corfu years, whom we meet in this glorious memoir: Quasimodo the pigeon, Achilles the Tortoise, Aleko the seagull, Ulysses the Owl, Sally the Donkey, Widdle and Puke the puppies and of course, Roger the dog.

Sophie and Jonty dive into the story behind the story of everyone’s favorite animal story and learn what was really going on behind the scenes of this delightful but dysfunctional family. Find out why “Mother,” Mrs. Durrell, moved with her children to Greece after a life in British India and Bournemouth; learn about the full identity of the irascible and hilarious brother Larry, and hear what happened to the other Durrell siblings after they became famous.

And for all the beauty and bucolic happiness of Corfu in the 1930s, there was backdrop of complex and fascinating geopolitical unrest across the Eastern Mediterranean, which Sophie wants to discuss in much greater depth than Jonty has patience for.

Mentioned in the episode:

Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, The Garden of the Gods.

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet; Prospero’s Cell

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