Emily (16), Travers (10), Angus (9), Maisie (7) and Oakley (1) lived in an idyllic 300-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds. They attended the local school, watched telly and did all the things English middle-class children do. Then, in 1995, their mother, a biologist, seized the opportunity to study lions in Botswana and, in the space of 3 months, changed the family's lives forever. Within 24 hours of landing in Gaborone they were travelling to their new home at Maun in the Okavango Delta, one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth. Just weeks after arriving, the children had made home in an old mission house full of stray dogs. Then there were the little things to attend to like getting fresh water, buying food, digging a toilet and finding out what creepy crawlies would kill you and which would not. Their classroom was an open hut and their back garden the Okavango Delta. Their free days were spent in a Land Rover tracking prides of lions across hundreds of miles of bush. The Lion Children is an extraordinary life-enhancing story about the joy of childhood and living in an environment as different as it can be.