Birds, Beasts and Relatives by Gerald Durrell

Looking for something of an easy read on holidays I found this on my Kindle and thought I’d give it a re-run. I found myself looking forward to getting back to the hotel room to read it, so painless and lightly entertaining was it. It’s a series of anecdotes about Durrell’s life on Corfu, where he lived from the age of 10 to 14 with his family. The previous novel My Family and Other Animals charted the whole story but this book is just additional stories, like the encounter with a gypsy man and his dancing bear, a trip to go night fishing and so forth. They are not the best of his stories – he’d already used those – but they were gently entertaining and a good respite from the more serious literature I’ve been reading for the past month.