Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy

The best selling stories of Gerald Durrell’s childhood on Corfu with his family and his animals

From 1935 to 1939, the Durrell family escaped from England and emigrated to sunny Corfu, an island off the coast of Greece.

Here a young Gerald Durrell roamed wild, collecting everything from geckoes to birds, met many strange characters and was tutored by the scholar, poet, doctor and naturalist Theodore Stephanides, who became an inspiration and a mentor to Gerald in later life.

This period is covered in the three books My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods (which were later republished in one book as The Corfu Trilogy).

While the first two books are roughly chronological, the last book (also published as Fauna and Family) is actually a miscellaneous collection of all the stories that didn’t fit into the first two books.

The first two are the most successful, if only because they’re better known, and the best selling My Family and Other Animals was later made into a television series and a film by the BBC (which is well worth watching).

The first story in Fillets of Plaice (1957) is also set in Corfu.