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eBook Category: Travel/Travel
eBook Description: 'Look! The weather has come from Scotland to welcome you to Mallorca,' beamed Senor Ferrer. To our new neighbour's delight and my dismay, a cold mantle of white was rapidly transforming our newly acquired paradise in the sun into a bizarre winterscape of citrus Christmas trees, cotton wool palms and Snowball Oranges. It's the stuff of dreams. A Scottish family giving up relative sanity and security to go and grow oranges for a living in a secluded valley in the mountains of the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. But dreams, as everyone knows, have a nasty habit of not turning out quite as intended. Being greeted by a freak snowstorm is only the first of many surprises and 'experiences', and it isn't long before they realise that they have been sold a bit of a lemon of an orange farm by the wily previous owners. However, laughter is the best medicine when confronted with consuming a local dish of rats, the live-chicken-down-a-chimney technique of household maintenance and attending a shotgun wedding. The colourful set of Mallorcan neighbours (including an eccentric old goatherd who eats worm-ridden oranges to improve his sex life) restores the family's faith in human nature and helps them adapt to a new and unexpectedly testing life in this deceptively simple idyll of rural Spain. Full of life and colour, hilarious and revealing, and set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Mallorca. By the same author: Manana Manana and Thistle Soup.

eBook Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd/Summersdale Travel, Published: 2004
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2005

Available eBook Formats:
All formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Adobe Acrobat Reader ISBN: 1840241128

"Kerr's book is an affectionate and amusing tale on Mallorca and its inhabitants, and he reckons there are a couple more volumes in the family's experience..."--Sunday Express

"With prose as elegant as this, Snowball Oranges is one travel book that needs no illustrations. In fact it reads more like a novel, brimming with charming characters and good humour ... By the time you reach the last page, you feel as though you are in the Mediterranean with them, and you don't want to go home."--Amazon.co.uk

"This book is firmly located in the 'foolhardy purchase of dilapidated property surrounded by eccentric neighbours in a foreign clime' tradition, popularised by Peter Mayle. Kerr's contribution is loosely and engagingly written and performs the crucial task of bringing the sights, sounds and smells of its locale vividly to life for its damp, chilly, wistful readers."--The Scotsman

It had all looked so different only a few hours earlier when Ellie and I pushed open the shutters to reveal the trim rows of fruit trees lining the valley floor, already bathed in warm December sunshine. It was our first morning on our newly-acquired Mallorcan farm, and we were content just to stand silently by the open window, allowing our senses to be intoxicated by the magic brews of sunlight and shadow, by drifting scents of wild herbs and the soothing sounds of tinkling sheep bells which fill those secret wedges of fertile land nestling so peacefully between the deep folds of pine-clad mountains in south-west Mallorca. This was truly an enchanted island, and we were blessed to be looking out over our own little piece of it--a few acres of sun-kissed heaven. A shrill ?SEŅOR P-E-T-E-R ... SEŅOR P-E-T-E-R ... H-O-L-A-A!" sliced through the tranquillity like a blunt knife. I opened the front door to behold the diminutive silhouette of a woman surrounded by a halo of golden light. A host of smaller silhouettes with ragged, spiky outlines milled around her sandalled feet, and there was something so strangely saint-like about this vision, blending almost hypnotically with the feeling of abiding calm which pervaded the valley, that I was all but overcome by a compelling impulse to drop to my knees in obeisant homage.