It was the summer of 1985. I was fourteen, precariously suspended in the grey zone between childhood and adolescence, and supremely bored. Bored of my friends, my family, and even, horrifyingly, of my books. I wandered over to my dad’s bookshelf, and was desultorily browsing past Dale Carnegie and Lee Iacocca when the words My Family and Other Animals winked up at me from the worn spine of an old 1964 paperback. I was instantly intrigued – how very clever a title! How biting the sarcasm! A funny book that lampooned family – just what I needed! I pulled the book out, and felt my heart sink – on the cover was the photograph of… a dragonfly. Huh? 

Still, I decided to give the book a chance. And tumbled, willy-nilly, into the fascinating, endlessly entertaining, and brilliantly captured slice of a magical, madcap childhood that critter-loving British naturalist and animal collector Gerald ​‘Gerry’ Durrell enjoyed on the Greek island of Corfu. 

My Family… was a funny book, the kind that made me snort loudly in a public bus. It did lampoon the Durrell family, relentlessly and affectionately. But it was above all an ode to the natural world. Never had I been so captivated or so charmed by a book of non-fiction, and that too on a subject I would not have voluntarily chosen to read. 

And then, there was the writing. Right from the opening line: July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky. I knew I was in the hands of a master raconteur. With ten-year-old Gerry as my guide, I roamed the olive groves of Corfu, locking eyes with earwigs and scorpions and mantids, taking home baby pigeons and tortoises and magpies and black-beaked gulls, and swimming in the clear, warm aquamarine of the Ionian Sea, surrounded by mountains of food and drink and the most chaotic group of family and friends. 

All the while, without even realising it, I was being rewired, even transformed, both as a person and as a writer. Gerry’s intense but non-judgmental curiosity about the natural world, and the respectful attention he paid to everything in it, taught me a most valuable lesson – in the great interdependent web of life, hierarchy is nonsense. Well before the term ​‘nature writing’ was coined, Gerald Durrell showed me that the books that move us most deeply are those in which nature whispers through the pages, and the writing, on its part, sees, acknowledges, and celebrates it.