LIFELINES

Finding solace in Greece.

In 2000, Hoffman and his wife, Julia, decided to move from the confining, hectic pace of London to one more suited to their shared love of “the wild nearby” in a remote corner of northern Greece called Prespa, a mountainous region that spills into Albania and Macedonia. They felt welcomed immediately. For the next several years, they lived in a rented house, growing herbs and vegetables for local restaurants in rented patches of soil, getting to know their neighbors, understanding the region’s long, complicated history, and becoming familiar with its richly diverse flora and fauna. A back injury ended Hoffman’s farming career and led him to writing; two previous books on nature have won awards. This latest book is not a chronologically straightforward story of Hoffman’s decision to pick up and start over in a new land. Rather, it leaps about in time and place, using his experiences in his chosen homeland as a foundation for a wide-ranging discussion about the earth-shattering changes the natural world has seen and felt since Hoffman and his wife settled in Prespa. Hoffman writes, “Worlds we once thought stable, permanent or, to borrow that understandable but misplaced pandemic word, normal, are being eclipsed and made relic by the twin emergencies of climate change and the Sixth Extinction of wild species.” At times, a tendency toward verbosity can obscure the author’s objectives for the reader. But eventually the land he clearly loves comes into focus, and the book comes to life when Hoffman’s eyes are on the region’s iconic species, including, in particular, the European brown bear and the Dalmatian pelican.

An elegiac, sometimes alarming, ultimately hopeful view of nature from the Balkans.