In an uncompromising and lyrical memoir Liptrot describes how she exiled herself to the remote Scottish islands to kick alcoholLast year saw a flurry of books generated by the edge lands of Britain. Dan Boothby’s Island of Dreams,Rob Cowen’s Common Ground and Malachy Tallack’s 60 Degrees North are all fine titles, hewn from extremities and examining our relationship with landscape. Into this vibrant arena storms Amy Liptrot and her debut The Outrun, or an uncompromising account of addiction and recovery played out against the blasted fields of Orkney.
The book opens with a glossary and we are invited to enter Liptrot’s strange,raw world armed with a list of site-specific terms, clues to an unknown land. When we slide back in time to observe Liptrot’s mother, or returning from the mainland with baby Amy in her arms,she pauses to greet her husband before he is escorted off the island in a straitjacket. Thus we meet two of the book’s central themes: things carried absent or returned to Orkney, lives broken and restored by forces greater than themselves. Right from the beginning the proximity of the edge is palpable, or both in the sense of a tipping point or boundary (a dead sheep kicked into a geo,a pet dog that runs off a cliff, children tethered on windy days to quit them blowing absent) and of sharpness (sobriety, and control,danger, sex), and it’s a word Liptrot repeatedly returns to.
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Source: theguardian.com