In her inventive essay “Diving Into Berghain”, published online last year, Amy Liptrot wrote about a night out at the notorious techno club in Berlin. Only it was actually a piece about wild sea swimming and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and the effect of loud bass (and flotation tanks) on the human body. In her debut book, The Outrun, Liptrot weaves similar webs, seamlessly linking memoir with topography, nature and a historical study of Orkney that stretches beyond the rocky archipelago, out across the oceans of time and into the cosmos.
Her story of escaping a remote sheep-farming upbringing in a locale called “the Outrun” for a life of thrills and hedonism in a sensory-overloaded, post-millennial London, followed by the almost inevitable psychic crash, subsequent spell in rehab and then slow recovery, back in the very landscape that she left, may seem familiar to anyone who has read more than one addiction memoir. Yet Liptrot refuses to wallow in self-pity, or dwell on the brutal late-night assault she survives in London (her attacker is sentenced to six years, for this and another attempted rape), and finds wonder instead in the drama of her surroundings, as if seeing them for the first time.
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