The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle

The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle is a children's novel by the English writer Hugh Lofting, published in 1922 and the second of his books about the doctor.

Tommy Stubbins tells the story, and he begins it as a boy in a provincial English town who has never heard of the Doctor until he starts asking. Dolittle can talk to animals, and his house is full of them: a parrot who teaches Tommy the language, a duck who runs the household, a dog, a pig and an owl. When a colleague named Long Arrow disappears, the Doctor fits out a ship and takes Tommy with him, and the voyage runs through storms, a shipwreck and an island that floats, with a good deal of natural history along the way. Lofting wrote this book for older children than its predecessor, and it is longer and more elaborate as a result.

It won the Newbery Medal for 1923, and it followed The Story of Doctor Dolittle in a series that ran for many more books.