Description

The Durrell Circle of relatives are immortalised in Gerald Durrell’s My Circle of relatives and Other Animals and its ITV adaptation, The Durrells. But what of The actual life Durrells? Why did they go to Corfu within the first place – and what happened to them after they left? The actual story of the Durrells is as surprising and fascinating as anything in Gerry’s books, and Michael Haag, with his first hand knowledge of the Circle of relatives, is the perfect narrator, drawing on diaries, letters and unpublished autobiographical fragments. The Durrells of Corfu describes the Circle of relatives’s upbringing in India and the crisis that brought them to England after which Greece., It recalls the genuine characters they encountered on Corfu – Theodore the biologist, the taxi driver Spiro Halikiopoulos and the prisoner Kosti – in addition to the talk over with of American author Henry Miller. And Haag has unearthed the story of how the Durrells left Corfu, including Margo’s and Larry’s last-minute escapes before the War. An extended epilogue looks on the emergence of Larry as a world famous novelist, and Gerry as a naturalist and champion of endangered species, in addition to the lives of the remainder of the Circle of relatives, their friends and other animals., The book is illustrated with Circle of relatives photos from the Gerald Durrell Archive, many of them reproduced here for the first time.