The Corfu Trilogy

This was one of my grandmother's favourite books and she gave it to me a year or so before she passed away. She told me that whenever she was sad, she would cover herself with a Durrell story and take a nap dreaming of him and his animals - and she didn't even like animals all that much - but she sure loved Durrell's writing.

What's not to love? Durrell's gentle humour while describing his family, his soaring, sweeping, rapturous descriptions of the countryside and the animals that inhabit it, the slow-moving yet absorbing nature of the minutae of his life as a small English boy living on a Greek island: the reader experiences every moment with him, and lives a utopic life they can only dream of through his eyes and words. Durrell's family (animals included) have given my family hope for decades that no matter how much of a misfit you are in society's eyes, there will always be a place out there for you, even if only in the pages of a well-written memoir.