Her descriptive writing of the islands and their wildlife absolutely sizzles, a scintillating mix of clear-eyed insight and poetic heart. The Outrun, her beautiful first book, gives a wonderfully evocative account of both, blending searing memoir with sublime nature writing, and coming up with a unique piece of prose that amounts to a stirring personal philosophy of how to live. It may even be a future classic.Īmy Liptrot has lived her life on the edge of things, both literally and metaphorically. Liptrot is an Orcadian warrior with the breeze in her blood and poetry in her fingers, and The Outrun equals works by fellow islanders such as George Mackay Brown and Peter Maxwell Davies. He sheer sensuality of Liptrot’s prose and her steely resolve immediately put her right up there with the best of the best. Luminous.… Fresh, clear-eyed and unflinching.
Uncompromising and lyrical … The Outrun is a bright addition to the exploding genre of writing about place and our place in the natural world.Ī lyrical, brave memoir.… It’s this aptitude Liptrot has for marrying her inner-space with wild outer-spaces that makes her such a compelling writer-and one to watch. Lyrical, transitioning from the rush of drinking into the raw sensations of island life. It was good for this ageing tech-head to read just how positive a force devices such as mobile phones can be for people who were brought up with such technology, and who take it almost for granted.A stunning, wild, and gracefully rendered account of life in the Scottish hinterlands. Modern technology features prominently in Liptrot’s life-even on far-flung Papa Westray. Liptrot realises she’s become totally messed-up, and knows she has to do something about it.Īlthough quite a bit of the book is set on the remote, wind-swept Orkney Islands, The Outrun is very much a twenty-first-century memoir. But The Outrun is also very different from Macdonald’s and Mabey’s books. In Liptrot’s case, the re-engagement was with Orkney. In some ways, The Outrun reminded me of Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, and Richard Mabey's Nature Cure, both of which describe overcoming depression by re-engaging with the natural world. Scary stuff too, for those of us who still enjoy what we like to think of as a social drink. Retrospective confessional, pulling no punches. At times, I cringed at Liptrot’s honesty, as she described the gradual degeneration of her social drinking into alcoholic abandon. The Outrun is an account of Amy Liptrot’s descent into alcoholism, having left her native Orkney for the bright lights of London, and her gradual recovery, first in London, then in Orkney.
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