The Outrun: A Memoir

by Amy Liptrot

Overview

“It’s wild writing: sexy, unguarded, raw, and ardent … highly recommended.”—The MillionsAfter 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 2016Sunday Times Top Ten BestsellerNew Statesman Book of the Year

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393355598
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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

[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

Luminous.… Fresh, clear-eyed and unflinching.

Sunday Times

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

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

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

Elle

The Outrun is an astonishingly beautiful book… Her account of her addiction and recovery is electric, sexy, immediate, and raw, leaving the reader reeling in her wake. And yet she’s also elegant, thoughtful, and controlled… A luminous, life-affirming book, and I have no doubt that I’ll be pressing it into people’s hands for years to come.”

Olivia Laing

A stunning, wild, and gracefully rendered account of life in the Scottish hinterlands.

San Francisco Chronicle

…[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

★ 01/09/2017
When Liptrot leaves rehab in London, she returns to her Orkney childhood home, the interior and exterior landscapes of which she maps in this spectacular memoir. Winds lash the land, sometimes moving tons of rock, as Liptrot weathers her cravings. On an island where the map can be “altered in the morning,” Liptrot remembers her drunken buzz through London. Descriptions of millennial city life are sorrowfully precise: “Years went by in a blur of waiting for the weekend, or for my article to be published, or for the hangover to end.” Later, she wonders, “Had all my life been leading up to doing Kundalini yoga with a bunch of pissheads... in various states of... mental anguish on an institutional carpet?” And yet, transcendence follows. She drives Orkney at night listening for threatened birds. She searches for a fata morgana, marvels at seals, but nevertheless wonders—why bother when one can “watch nature documentaries on YouTube?” Even with “twenty tabs open,”, this magnificent memoir is a record of transformation in its truest sense—what it means to leave behind the tabs for experience. 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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A lyrical, brave memoir… [Liptrot] walks the hills and dances between the standing stones of Stenness; she joins a wild swimming club and, hauling herself from the gelid waters, ‘naked on the beach, I am a selkie slipped from its skin.’ 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.

Will Self - Guardian

[Liptrot’s] prose is spare, lean, and beautiful, much like the country about which she writes.

Booklist (starred)

[A] gorgeous debut. . . . Full of lucid self-discovery and shimmering prose.

New York Times Book Review

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