A Vet Has Nine Lives

‘The author will have you in stitches’ Sunday Pictorial 


‘A Vet Has Nine Lives’, written six years before James Herriot first put pen to paper, is the second in this entertaining series of books based on the hilarious exploits of a vet who was practising in London and the Home Counties in the late 1950s. 


Young Michael Morton has agreed to do a locum for fellow vet Phil Brogan in the quintessentially English village of Craftley and soon realises that change is threatening the old-world values of this rural Surrey idyll. 


Chemicals have come to farming for the first time. Foot-and-mouth disease is spreading like wild fire. Property developers are looking greedily at this corner of England’s green and pleasant land. 


The village is feeling its way into the post-war world of new freedoms, profit and pretentious artiness. So complete a microcosm of the wider world is it that a miniature Cold War is only narrowly averted when the Russian colt Princeling II arrives with its jockey at Craftley Manor stables. 


Michael is as likely to be dealing with cows, race horses and an owl with an upset stomach as he is the doggies and pussies of his uncle’s London practice. But, as ever, matters of the heart are never far from the surface. When his fiancée, Julia, calls off their wedding and a 20-year feud erupts over an Ayrshire bull that has found its way in amongst the local dairy herd, it is clear that this vet is going to need all of his proverbial nine lives just to survive. 


‘The author’s fast and furious pave never conceals a hard core of veterinary experience.’ The Countryman 


‘Lots of laughs and lots of fascinating animal revelations.’ She Magazine