Book Review

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, Canongate, 2016.

Amy Liptrot was born in Orkney to English parents who had gone north to find a farm they could afford and to live ‘the good life’. In her late teens she went to London looking for the bright lights of the big city. She found them, but they led to grotty bedsits in Hackney, addiction to drugs and alcohol, and increasingly self-destructive behaviour. Eventually she got herself into rehab, and then returned to Orkney to try to stabilise her life, renting a cottage from the RSPB on the tiny island of Papa Westray. This book intercuts her increasingly desperate life in London with her earlier experiences of island life and then her retreat back to Orkney. It paints a vivid picture of her life in both places, and of her inner world throughout this time.

Will Self in the Guardian said “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. I may be biased, since I’m familiar with both the topography of Orkney and know the badlands of addiction like the back of my track-marked hand – but I enjoyed this book enormously, even as I worried about its brave but vulnerable author, struggling to reach the good life for which her parents once went in search.”

The Scotsman summed up The Outrun thus: “This is a bold-hearted and brave-minded book. It is both terribly sad and awfully affecting. That Liptrot wrote it in Orkney, where “the Orkney Disease” was once used on the Mainland of Scotland to refer to sottishness and melancholy, and that she both captured that sense and proved it could be transformational as well, is no small achievement. I look forward to its presence on some prize lists.”

Alan Bellamy