 | |
| Author | Amy Liptrot |
|---|---|
| Genre | Recovery memoir, nature writing |
| Set in | Orkney |
| Published | 2016 |
| Publisher | Canongate Books |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Awards |
Wainwright Prize 2016 PEN/Ackerley Prize 2017 |
| ISBN | 978-1-78211-549-6 |
The Outrun is a 2016 memoir by the Scottish journalist and author Amy Liptrot. It is set in Orkney, her childhood home, where she returned to rehabilitate after becoming an alcoholic in London. The book combines nature writing with self-reflection. It won her the 2016 Wainwright Prize and the 2017 PEN/Ackerley Prize.
Summary
The Outrun describes Amy Liptrot's experiences when she returns to live in Orkney, where she grew up on a farm, her father schizophrenic and bipolar, her mother an evangelical Christian. She tells of her rehabilitation after ten unhappy years in London, during which she had become an alcoholic and drug taker. She combines reflections and memories with immediate descriptions of the islands' wild nature, wind, geology, and wildlife. To her surprise, she gets a temporary job, on Orkney, mapping rare corncrakes for the RSPB. Later, she spends a winter on the Orkney island of Papa Westray in the RSPB's house, normally only used in summer.
The book is illustrated with hand-drawn maps of the Orkney Islands and of the island of Papa Westray.
Publication
The Outrun was first published in paperback by Canongate Books of Edinburgh in 2016. It was brought out in hardback in the United States by W. W. Norton & Company in 2017. It has been translated into languages including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish.
Reception
The New York Times book review, by Domenica Ruta, calls The Outrun a "gorgeous debut" and "a patiently wrought memoir". The "recovery memoir" is "full of lucid self-discovery and shimmering prose, ... more atmospheric than it is dramatic." The nature writing shapes the book into "a kind of personal travelogue of the Orkney Islands, their numinous geology and mystical history, from the unique perspective of one who is both an outsider and a native."
Doug Johnstone in The Independent calls The Outrun a beautiful book, which gives "a wonderfully evocative account", at once a "searing memoir" and "sublime nature writing". In his view, the book adds up to a "stirring personal philosophy" of life. He finds the account of her "descent into drink ... raw and powerful ... without histrionics or melodrama". On her nature writing, Johnstone says that her account "of the islands and their wildlife absolutely sizzles, a scintillating mix of clear-eyed insight and poetic heart."
In The Scotsman, Stuart Kelly writes that Liptrot interlaces "the spiralling chaos of her London life with the spiralling skies above Orkney." He places the book among "the New Nature Writing", citing works like Helen Macdonald's personal 2014 memoir H is for Hawk, which both told of "trauma and loss" and a close "engagement with the natural world". Kelly denies the book is a "recovery memoir", on the grounds that it emphasizes the difficulty of staying sober. He calls the book "bold-hearted and brave-minded", at once "terribly sad and awfully affecting."
Ian Thomson, reviewing the book in The Daily Telegraph, writes that "The Outrun is a glory to read. Matchless descriptions of landscape are combined with thoughtful reflections on Orcadian culture and local Norse legend. Liptrot, with all her newfound, disabused integrity and hard-won sobriety, has written a minor classic of addiction literature."
The Outrun was BBC Radio 4's "Book of the Week" from 18 January 2016. The BBC's Simon Richardson calls the book a "moving alcoholism memoir", likening it to Cheryl Strayed's 2012 Wild which describes walking the long-distance Pacific Crest Trail "to try to outwalk her dissolute life."
Film adaptation
In January 2022, it was announced that Nora Fingscheidt would direct the film adaptation of The Outrun, and that Saoirse Ronan would star in and produce it. Filming began in 2022 in Orkney.
Bibliography
- Liptrot, Amy (2016). The Outrun. Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-78211-549-6. OCLC 1302144056.