This book is soaked in the sunshine of Corfu where the author lived as a boy with his 'Family and other Animals'.

It is a matter of personal taste whether one most enjoys the family, with its many eccentric hangers-on, or the animals Gerry studies and brings back to the strawberry pink, the daffodil-yellow, or the snow-white villa.

The procession 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 magpies.