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Walking towards a home in Greece
When author Julian Hoffman first arrived in Greece’s remote Prespa region, his Greek was “almost non-existent.” Walking became a form of literacy for him—a way to learn the language of the land by tracing the steps of others, reading stone walls, abandoned houses, plant communities, and animal tracks. “Walking was a way in,” he says,
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WALC Café: Walking towards a home in Greece – a Walking Writers Salon with Julian Hoffman
Video recording of a conversation between Julian Hoffman, author of Lifelines – searching for home in the mountains of Greece, and Annemarie Lopez. When Julian first arrived in Greece’s remote Prespa region, his Greek was “almost non-existent.” Walking became a form of literacy for him—a way to learn the language of the land by tracing the
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• • 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.
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