Lush prose is devoted to the minutiae of Orkney’s natural beauty - its crying seabirds, the small, precious flowers that survive both the harsh weather and the grazing sheep, the clearness of the night sky - and so it feels like a slap in the face when Liptrot savagely yanks back the beautiful curtain she has hung for us to reveal the realities of her life on the islands: a collie pup that tumbled off the edge of a cliff while chasing a rabbit, never to be seen again, or an ewe that trampled her newborn lambs to death. Liptrot’s memoir feels refined yet also raw at the same time, if that’s even possible.

In some ways, I felt like this book was battering me. The climate of the islands is (relatively) temperate thanks to the warm waters brought by the Gulf Stream, but the wind and waves of the northern Atlantic Ocean are unrelenting, battering the islands and their people without mercy. Orkney is a collection of islands off the northern coast of Scotland, many of which are now uninhabited. 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.Ĭontent Warnings: alcoholism, drug abuse and addiction, discussion of a parent having severe mental illness, animal death, brief mention of racism, suicide of an extremely minor character Review 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. Unable to control her drinking, alcohol gradually took over. She moved to London and found herself in a hedonistic cycle. But as she grew up, she longed to leave this remote life. Approaching the land that was once home, memories of her childhood merge with the recent events that have set her on this journey.Īmy 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. 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.

The outrun liptrot