All Creatures Great and Small

James Herriot is a pen name. The man writing is James Alfred Wight, a working veterinary surgeon in the Yorkshire Dales, and the American book called All Creatures Great and Small is not one book at all — it's an omnibus stitched together from the first two volumes he published in Britain, If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet, put out together because the individual books were judged too short to sell on their own in the US.

The stories are drawn from his own rounds: calving in a freezing barn at 2am, a farmer who won't spend a shilling more than he has to, a dog with a problem nobody can name yet. He works for Siegfried Farnon, a brilliant and erratic senior partner, and Siegfried's younger brother Tristan, a veterinary student who treats the practice as mostly an excuse to avoid studying. The Dales themselves — the weather, the hill farms, the distances — are as much a subject as any animal.

It's warm rather than dramatic, and episodic by nature since it was built from two smaller books rather than written as one. Readers who want a driving plot will feel the seams; readers who want the texture of a country vet's working life, one case at a time, are exactly who it's for.