The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
From Aberdeen, Amy Liptrot catches the overnight ferry north to the Orkney Islands, returning to the sheep farm of her childhood after drinking herself to destruction in London. There are plenty of ghosts ashore - not least the spectre of returning home near broken. She swallows sea-sickness pills and sleeps on the floor, unsettled by the accents around.
“I wonder if it’s possible to really come back once you’ve lived away for a while, or if it’s called coming ‘home’ when you never belonged.” (85)
In London Liptrot had checked into rehab; now on Orkney she checks into life - taking a geeky interest in land, sea, and sky. She rebuilds a drystone dyke, volunteers on an RSPB corncrake project, and assists her father with the year’s lambing and fostering. She studies clouds, astronomy, and fluid dynamics, and observes the resident puffins, fulmars, hen harriers, and guillemots. She goes wild swimming with the Orkney Polar Bear Club and winters on Papa Westray.
When I pull myself up, a bit shaken, and look back over the dyke, I see a car stop. The driver gets out, slings a dead sheep out of the boot then kicks it over the edge of the geo, down the cliff, into the sea below. There is a lot of edge here. (234)
Liptrot’s prose is refined, dispassionate, at times poetic with sea rhythm:
“It’s a misty night with no sunset and it’s spooky in the geo…”. (195)
Despite the wailing winds, The Outrun is a quiet, reflective book with little dialogue. I enjoyed Liptrot’s clarity, her diction, the lingering over terms like nautical twilight, and the similes between mind, body, the Internet, and the bleak, wild beauty of the Northern Isles.
The Outrun was the 2016 winner of The Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
If you liked The Outrun, try:
Wild Writing by Kathryn Aalto - a field guide to 25 British and North American female nature writers.
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn - after losing her home and business, Winn walks England’s 630-mile South West Coast Path.
Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler - an emotional reckoning on Birmingham’s waterways
