The Butterfly Lion

by Michael Morpurgo, Christian Birmingham (Illustrator)

Overview

ILLUSTRATED BY CHRISTIAN BIRMINGHAM.
A lyrical and moving tale of a young boy growing up in Africa, and his lifelong friendship with a white lion.

“All my life I’ll think of you, I promise I will. I won’t ever forget you.”

Bertie rescues an orphaned white lion cub from the African veld. They are inseparable until Bertie is sent to boarding school far away in England and the lion is sold to a circus. Bertie swears that one day they will see one another again, but it is the butterfly lion which ensures that their friendship will never be forgotten.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780007380626
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/24/2011
Series:	First Modern Classics
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	9 - 11 Years

About the Author

Michael Morpurgo OBE is one of Britain's best loved writers for children, with sales of over 35 million copies. He has written over 150 books, has served as Children’s Laureate, and has won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, the Writers Guild Award, the Whitbread Award, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Eleanor Farjeon Lifetime Achievement Award. With his wife, Clare, he is the co-founder of Farms for City Children. Michael was knighted in 2018 for services to literature and charity.

Christian Birmingham is a young artist of outstanding talent. In 1991 he graduated from Exeter College of Art and Design and has since illustrated several highly praised books. Christian lives in Brighton, Sussex.

Editorial Reviews

A runaway schoolboy finds a magnificent monument to a magnificent animal in this ghost story, at once marvelous and matter-of-fact, from Morpurgo (Robin of Sherwood, 1996, etc.). The author casts himself as the ten-year-old narrator, whose attempt to run away from a miserable boarding-school existence ends in a dusty house, where a friendly old widow shows him a great lion cut into the chalk on a hillside—the butterfly lion. She tells him how it came to be there: Her Bertie, a lonely boy in South Africa, found and began to raise a white lion cub, tearfully saw it sold to a French circus owner, reclaimed it years later during the Great War, and brought it to England to live. When it died, Bertie spent the next 40 years carving its likeness on the hill. Astonishing in itself, the chalk lion becomes even moreso after a rain, when thousands of Adonis Blue butterflies gather on it. Urging him to come again, the old woman takes the boy back to school; only later does he learn that she died—as her husband did—years ago. This dreamlike story is suffused with a man's lifelong love for a rare, gentle animal friend.

Kirkus Reviews

‘The Butterfly Lion is unique among animals and books, and will touch all hearts – both young and old’ Virginia McKenna, Born Free Foundation

From the Publisher