Lifelines: North American edition

I’m delighted to share the finished cover for the North American edition of Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece, which will be published by Godine on April 14th. With huge thanks to Nicole Caputo for the absolutely beautiful design and for having the brilliant idea of placing Edward Lear’s illustration of a Dalmatian pelican at the heart of it. Lear made the hand-painted lithograph from a sketch by John Gould for a coloured plate in the 1837 edition of Birds of Europe. Given the Dalmatian pelican’s presence in Lifelines – a book set largely set around the ancient Prespa lakes in northern Greece where this species thrives and which has been my home for the past quarter of a century – I couldn’t be happier with the choice. As a side note, Edward Lear passed across the top of Great Prespa Lake on his journey by horse through Greece, Albania and nearby Ottoman lands in 1848, encountering wild Dalmatian pelicans in person for the first time when he saw 600 of them in Albania’s Narta lagoon, thinking from a distance that they were large white stones in the water.

While the UK edition of Lifelines has been out for a few months now – being name one of the FT’s Best Summer Books – I’m so excited to see this version take flight soon. And I’m deeply grateful to two writers whose work I greatly admire for providing these generous quotes ahead of publication:

“An exquisite exploration of belonging and what ‘home’ means in a world convulsed by change. Every page shimmers with beautifully evoked stories and insights. Mountains, bears, birds, people, flowers, and more converge and come to vivid life in these pages full of love and wisdom.” ~ David George Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees

“A rich journey into the meaning of shelter and finding it in an unsteady world — Lifelines is part memoir, part homing-manual, told through encounters with bears and rivers, wrens, and people. A remarkable and beautiful read. ~ Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast

The North American edition is now available to pre-order at your favourite independent bookshops and all the usual places, including Bookshop.org, which helps support indie stores. And if any reviewers would like to receive an advance copy please let me know. Thanks!