Michael Haag has focused on a five-year period in the life of the Durrell family when Louisa and her four children decamped to Corfu in 1935. It was a crucial time for all of them. “We had arrived,” Gerald wrote later, “at a place that was to be of enormous influence over all of us”.
Louisa’s husband had died in their native India in 1928 and she and the children had moved to England, but never settled; Corfu, then, was a chance to regain a lost paradise.
Gerald began his first menagerie shortly after disembarking, and the book soon swarms with beetles, dragonflies – and a four-legged chicken. The word “magical” recurs often and these pages conjure the restorative, redemptive atmosphere of sunlight on stone. It was the war that did them in. When Italy invaded Albania in the spring of 1939, its navy stationed just two miles from Corfu, the Durrells left. Surprisingly, they never returned. And by 1967, Gerald reckoned, tourism had already ruined the island.
• The Durrells of Corfu by Michael Haag is published by Profile (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
