9780393608960 |
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Searching... Library 21c | Book | 616.86106 LIPT | Biography | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
When Amy Liptrot returns to Orkney after more than a decade away, she is drawn back to the Outrun on the sheep farm where she grew up. Approaching the land that was once home, memories of her childhood merge with the recent events that have set her on this journey.
Amy was shaped by the cycle of the seasons, birth and death on the farm, and her father's mental illness, which were as much a part of her childhood as the wild, carefree existence on Orkney. But as she grew up, she longed to leave this remote life. She moved to London and found herself in a hedonistic cycle. Unable to control her drinking, alcohol gradually took over. Now thirty, she finds herself washed up back home on Orkney, standing unstable at the cliff edge, trying to come to terms with what happened to her in London.
Spending early mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, the days tracking Orkney's wildlife--puffins nesting on sea stacks, arctic terns swooping close enough to feel their wings--and nights searching the sky for the Merry Dancers, Amy slowly makes the journey toward recovery from addiction.
The Outrun is a beautiful, inspiring book about living on the edge, about the pull between island and city, and about the ability of the sea, the land, the wind, and the moon to restore life and renew hope.
A Guardian Best Nonfiction Book of 2016
Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller
New Statesman Book of the Year
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* While this memoir is built on common themes small-town girl, desperate to escape to the big city, lands herself in trouble they're just scaffolding. Liptrot's home is the windblown Orkney Islands off the northeast coast of Scotland, a place both easy and difficult to escape. After too many years of hard drinking and partying in London, and too many wrecked relationships, she finally admits that she is an alcoholic and returns home. It feels like failure at first, but gradually Liptrot finds a way to live sober and appreciate things she once fled. She reconnects with her divorced parents, mentally ill father and evangelical Christian mother, both of whom still live on the island. Liptrot is clear-eyed when she describes the great emptiness left after giving up alcohol and why the temptations to start drinking again still nag at her. This may make the book sound bleak to potential readers, but it isn't. Whether she 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.--Curbow, Joan Copyright 2017 Booklist