All Creatures Great and Small Books in Order

The All Creatures Great and Small books follow a young veterinary surgeon, James Herriot, as he finds his feet in the hills and valleys of the Yorkshire Dales. Drawn from James Alfred Wight’s real experience, the stories blend memoir and fiction, turning the daily work of a mixed practice into an ongoing, character-driven saga.

The series begins in the late 1930s, when newly qualified Herriot arrives in the fictional village of Darrowby to work for the eccentric Siegfried Farnon. Skeldale House, the surgery and home he shares with Siegfried and his irrepressible younger brother Tristan, becomes the fixed point in a life spent driving along narrow lanes to outlying farms. From the start, the books are built from short, self-contained chapters: a difficult calving here, a dog with mysterious symptoms there, each framed by James’s growing understanding of the place and its people.

Darrowby itself is as important as any single character. Herriot describes draughty stone barns, windswept moorland, crowded markets and kitchen tables where farmers serve enormous meals to the visiting vet. Every trip in his battered car brings him into contact with new personalities—proud smallholders, tight-fisted landowners, shy young farmers and formidable matriarchs—who reappear across the books like old neighbours. The humour often lies in their habits and speech as much as in the antics of their animals.

At the centre of the human cast stands Siegfried, brilliant with animals and infuriating with paperwork, and Tristan, charming, lazy and somehow perpetually in mild trouble. Their shifting moods, late-night arguments and genuine loyalty give the series the feel of a found family long before that phrase was common. Helen Alderson, the capable farmer’s daughter who becomes James’s wife, adds a steadier note, connecting the vet’s world to life on the land.

As the books progress, time moves from the pre-war years into World War II and beyond. Herriot’s own service in the Royal Air Force, his separation from Helen and the practice, and his eventual return to Yorkshire are all woven into later volumes. Along the way he quietly records changes in agriculture and veterinary medicine: horses giving way to tractors, antibiotics replacing older remedies, and a gradual shift from farm animals to pets as the mainstay of many practices.

Despite those changes, the tone stays remarkably consistent. These are not mystery plots or high-stakes thrillers; the tension usually comes from whether a calf will survive, a difficult farmer will be won over, or a much-loved pet can be saved. Moments of loss are handled plainly, without melodrama, and are often balanced by small comic triumphs or acts of neighbourliness.

For new readers, the series offers the pleasure of dropping into a world where each chapter stands alone yet contributes to a larger tapestry. You can read straight through in publication order or dip in and out, following favourite animals, farmers or members of the Farnon household. However you approach it, All Creatures Great and Small is less about one big story than about returning, again and again, to a community that feels increasingly like home.