The Lion Children

The Great Adventure of an English Family in the African Bush, Told in their Own Words.

The enchanting true story of three children who, with their mum, their elder sister and younger brother, up sticks from the Cotswolds to study lions in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, written by the children themselves.

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 three months changed the family's lives for ever.

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. But above all it is about the lions who we get to know through the eyes of the children themselves.

Through Jane Goodall we came to love the land and chimpanzees of Gombe Stream on Lake Tanganyika, so through Travers (now 16), Angus (now 14) and Maisie (now 12) we will come to know and love the country and the lions of the Okavango. This story will capture the public's heart and imagination. It is illustrated with the children's own drawings and photographs taken over the five years.