Soaked in the sunshine of Corfu, where the author lived as a boy, this delightful book tells of Gerald Durrell's early life with his 'family and other animals'. Brought vividly to life are the extraordinary members of the Durrell family and their many eccentric hangers-on, as well as the bizarre menagerie Gerry adopts for closer study. The procession of creatures he brings back to the strawberry-pink, the daffodil-yellow or the snow-white villa includes toads and tortoises, bats and butterflies, scorpions and geckos, ladybirds, glow-worms, octopuses and rose-beetles, Quasimodo the pigeon, the puppies Widdle and Puke and, of course, the Magenpies.