The Outrun: A Memoir

by Amy Liptrot

Overview

“It’s wild writing: sexy, unguarded, raw, and ardent … highly recommended.”—The Millions

After a decade of heavy partying and hard drinking in London, Amy Liptrot returns home to Orkney, a remote island off the north of Scotland. The Outrun maps Amy’s inspiring recovery as she walks along windy coasts, swims in icy Atlantic waters, tracks Orkney’s wildlife, and reconnects with her parents, revisiting and rediscovering the place that shaped her.

A Guardian Best Nonfiction Book of 2016
Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller
New Statesman Book of the Year

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393355598
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Amy Liptrot received the Wainwright Prize for nature writing and the PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir for The Outrun. Formerly a writer for Orkney Today, editor of the Edinburgh Student, an artist’s model, and a trampolinist, she lives in Yorkshire.

Table of Contents

Glossary xi

Prologue xiii

1 The Outrun 1

2 Tremors 9

3 Flotta 15

4 London Fields 23

5 Nightbike 35

6 Flitting 43

7 Wrecked 53

8 Treatment 61

9 Drifting 75

10 Dyking 83

11 Ambergris 95

12 Abandoned Islands 103

13 Lambing 113

14 The Corncrake Wife 123

15 Rose Cottage 135

16 Papay 151

17 Merry Dancers 163

18 North Hill 171

19 Online 183

20 Sea Swimming 193

21 The Holm 201

22 Personal Geology 209

23 Triduana 221

24 Fair Isle 231

25 Bonfire 243

26 Undersea 253

27 Strandings 261

28 Renewables 269

Acknowledgements 279

Editorial Reviews

"A stunning, wild, and gracefully rendered account of life in the Scottish hinterlands."— San Francisco Chronicle

"Lyrical, transitioning from the rush of drinking into the raw sensations of island life."— Elle

"Uncompromising and lyrical … The Outrun is a bright addition to the exploding genre of writing about place and our place in the natural world."— Observer

"A 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."— Guardian

"Luminous.… Fresh, clear-eyed and unflinching."— Sunday Times

"[T]he sheer sensuality of Liptrot’s prose and her steely resolve immediately put her right up there with the best of the best. 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. It may even be a future classic."— New Statesman

"Amy Liptrot has lived her life on the edge of things, both literally and metaphorically. 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. Her descriptive writing of the [Orkney] islands and their wildlife absolutely sizzles, a scintillating mix of clear-eyed insight and poetic heart."— Independent on Sunday

"Whether [Liptrot]… writes of walking along the wind-scoured coasts or taking polar-bear dips in the icy waters, her prose is spare, lean, and beautiful, much like the country about which she writes."— Booklist

"This magnificent memoir is a record of transformation in its truest sense… Orkney legends tell of seals changing into humans, but, here, Liptrot is the shape-shifter, peeling off her wetsuit like blubber after snorkeling in the ice-cold sea."— Publishers Weekly

"Worth reading for the descriptions of life on a ‘beautiful, barely touched stretch of land.’"— Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2017 PEN/Ackerley Prize, Winner

PAPERBACK COMMENTARY

…[a] gorgeous debut…More than 10 years after fleeing, Liptrot returns to the Orkney Islands, chronicling the first two years of her sobriety in this recovery memoir closer in spirit to the work of the naturalist Rick Bass than the hard-drinking tales of Caroline Knapp or Augusten Burroughs. Full of lucid self-discovery and shimmering prose, The Outrun is more atmospheric than it is dramatic…Building drystone walls becomes a lesson in patience; delivering newborn lambs brings a sense of renewal. Metaphors lay things bare with a stunning simplicity as Liptrot searches for answers again and again in her island landscape, all sky and sea, where not even language has the ability to conceal.

The New York Times Book Review - Domenica Ruta

2017-02-07
After a decade in London, a troubled woman returns home to a rural island in northern Scotland, hoping to heal.Liptrot begins with the harrowing details of her birth. When she was just hours old, her mother rode a wheelchair down the runway of an airport and placed her in the lap of her straightjacket-clad father, who was to be airlifted to a mental hospital on the mainland. It's a fitting introduction to the chronicle of a life plagued with hardship. The author grew up on a farm high on the cliffs of Orkney: "nothing but cliffs and ocean between it and Canada." Her parents were outsiders from England who had come to the insular island to start anew, and they were an odd pair—an evangelical Christian and a bipolar schizophrenic. Liptrot longed to escape and eventually did, to London. Of course, the pain didn't disappear; she found herself covering it up with destructive behavior: drugs, alcohol, and meaningless sex. As she writes, "my life was rough and windy and tangled." Bookstores are packed with countless addiction memoirs, and there are also plenty that see a prodigal son or daughter coming home to slay his or her demons. What makes Liptrot's book different is the otherworldly setting. When she returned to the Orkneys, she immersed herself in nature, taking long walks around her family's wind-swept land, early-morning swims in the frigid cold Atlantic Ocean, watching the northern lights from an old theater in the middle of town, and tracking the flocks of birds coming down from the Arctic. Eventually, Liptrot found peace and began to imagine a kind of future she had never before thought possible. She also includes a glossary to define such terms as "haar" (sea fog) and "kirk" (church). An ordinary addiction memoir set in an extraordinary place—worth reading for the descriptions of life on a "beautiful, barely touched stretch of land."

Kirkus Reviews