Amy Liptrot

After a decade of heavy partying and hard drinking in London, Amy Liptrot returns home to Orkney, a remote island off the north of Scotland. The Outrun maps Amy's inspiring recovery as she walks along windy coasts, swims in icy Atlantic waters, tracks Orkney's wildlife, and reconnects with her parents, revisiting and rediscovering the place that shaped her. A Guardian Best Nonfiction Book of 2016 Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller New Statesman Book of the Year

A Memoir

The Outrun

Laura Dobie

I'm repairing these dykes at the same time as I'm putting myself back together. I am building my defences, and each time I don't take a drink when I feel like it, I am strengthening new pathways in my brain. I have to break the walls down a bit more before I can start to build them up again. I have to work with the stones I've got and can't spend too long worrying if I'm making the perfect wall. I just have to get on with placing stones.

This week I’ve seen more seals than people, noses uppermost in the bay.

This is such a beautiful description of a murmuration of starlings.

Every day on Papay, there's a moment, looking back, facing into the northerly wind, at the coastline I've just walked, for instance, when my heart soars. I see starlings flocking, hundreds of individual birds forming and re-forming shapes in liquid geometry, outwitting predators and following each other to find a place to roost for the night.

Maybe things are not going to be so bad. I've swapped disco lights for celestial lights but I'm still surrounded by dancers. I am orbited by sixty-seven moons.

A Fata Morgana can be seen yet never approached. Like Hether Blether, it always remains on the strip of the horizon.

AA recommends meditation, which I find hard - I get distracted, upset or fall asleep - so instead I practise my own form of contemplation by walking on the hill and absorbing my surroundings. When I walk, I am soothed by being in motion.

over years of systematic drinking I had worn my brakes down, like the action of waves on rock, so much that they could never be repaired.

There are different types of breaking waves - spilling, plunging, collapsing, surging - but although they collapse in different manners, there is only so much height any wave can sustain before it comes crashing down.

The Outrun quotes

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