Many of us started identifying gulls with the aid of Peter Grant’s classic Gulls: A Guide to Identification, and for over two decades that work has remained our main reference for tricky identifications. Malling Olsen and Larsson’s new gull book (hereafter Gulls) aims to replace Grant. The authors state that Gulls is a guide to the identification and distribution of the gulls of the Holarctic and should be judged only as such; I will concentrate on these aspects of the book.