In summer 2000, Julian Hoffman and his wife Julia abandoned the London treadmill for the unknown. A serendipitous book discovery led them to Prespa, a remote corner of northern Greece where three countries converge around two ancient lakes. It’s a landscape of limestone and granite, Mediterranean warmth and Balkan cold, where pelicans, bears, and displaced peoples all trace their stories along the water’s edge.

Lifelines chronicles Hoffman and his wife Julia’s bold leap into this unfamiliar territory and the discovery of the wild and human inhabitants there. Moving through the seasons with a naturalist’s precision and poet’s heart, Hoffman captures moments of startling beauty: a bear silhouetted against spring wildflowers, winter wrens huddling for warmth above a frozen threshold, the villagers who endure isolation and the ghosts of a traumatic past.

Prespa is no easy sanctuary. Its banks hide unexploded ordnance; its villages echo with voices of the departed. Yet within this complexity lies refuge, a place where new possibilities take root. Through intimate observation, Hoffman weaves a larger meditation on belonging, loss, and the courage to rebuild.

This is no Year in Provence. Hoffman is clear-eyed about a place that mirrors our fractured times, offering both a memoir and a manifesto for finding home amid uncertainty.

At once intimate and expansive, Lifelines explores the thresholds we cross between countries, species, and the selves we leave behind when we dare to begin again. For walking book enthusiasts, it also offers a deeply immersive journey into one of Europe’s most compelling and little-known landscapes.

Published by Elliott & Thompson in 2025 

ISBN: 9781783968640

eBook ISBN: 9781783968657

Cover: Hardback

Published: May 15, 2025

Pages: 304

Julian Hoffman will be a Walking Writers’ Salon guest on 10 December, 2025.

Text by Annemarie Lopez.