Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece

I first wrote this post in May of 2025 when my new book, Lifelines, had just been published, so I thought I would update a few things now that the US edition and the UK paperback are out as well. The story, of course, remains the same. The book was released nearly twenty-five years after my wife, Julia, and I arrived in Prespa in northern Greece with the aim of radically changing our lives. All we had to go on at the time was a book about the region that had convinced us it was the place we should move to after reading it over too much wine one evening in our apartment in London. Showing up here, of course, was just the beginning of our journey, because the far greater, more challenging and much richer one was the journey into a place and its community of people and wild species as we tried to make a home for ourselves in this crossroads landscape of mountains and lakes shared by three countries: Greece, Albania and North Macedonia. Not in our wildest dreams did we ever imagine we might still be here all this time later, but it seems that books can, and do, fundamentally change our lifelines.

This is a book of homecoming. It’s a story about the people of these mountains, the rare pelicans nesting on the lakes, the borders that divide the waters and the brown bears that forage in the valley behind our house. It’s a story of incredible generosity and welcome, having arrived here with overloaded rucksacks holding everything we thought we might need in these new lives of ours but with absolutely no idea of what would come next on our journey. A story, ultimately, of a shared world. And because it’s a shared world, this book isn’t just about the move we made to a mountain village above these ancient lakes, but brings together other home places and stories of shelter and resilience from across the planet. At a time when the climate and biodiversity crises are undermining the stability of the single sphere we share, it’s about the ways in which the lifelines of the world hold together the greater home of us all.

I’d like to say an immense thank you to Ola Galewicz for her stunning cover and to Matina Galati for her beautiful map and interior illustrations. In case of interest, an excerpt of the book about bears, wonder, outer space and humility is up on Terrain.org and a short section from the introduction on the seasonal return of pelicans to these mountain lakes can be read at Caught by the River here. And I’m delighted that the book was chosen by the Financial Times as one of their Best Summer Reads and by the extremely positive reviews in the Observer and the TLS, as well as being Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. I’m deeply thrilled and honoured that the book was the winner of the 2026 Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award.

I’m also absolutely thrilled to share that the paperback of Lifelines is a Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month for July! You can find it on display in more than 300 of their shops across the UK and through their website. I wrote a short post for the Waterstones blog about how books can changes lives. The book is also available to buy or order from your favourite independent bookshops and all the usual sites, some of which I’ve listed below:

Waterstones
Booktique (Greece – signed copies in stock, Kolonaki, Athens – contact to reserve)
Sam Read Bookseller
Marlow Bookshop
Sevenoaks Books
Blackwell’s
Bookshop.org (UK)
Foyles
Public (Greece)
Politeia (Greece)
Dussmann (Germany)
Bokus (Sweden)
Amazon.co.uk
Captain Book (Greece)
Bookshop.org (US)

There’s also an audio book beautifully narrated by Chris Harper here.

I do hope you enjoy the book and please let me know if you have any questions at all. I’ll finish this post with a photo of our Prespa village under snow (it’s not quite Greece of the imagination up here!), and of Julia and I in our fields many years ago when we decided to become organic market gardeners on the outskirts of the same village. Thanks for reading!