Snowball Oranges: One Mallorcan Winter - Peter Kerr

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. Snowball Oranges is hilarious and revealing, full of life and colour, set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Mallorca.