Her writing is contemplative, but comes with pleasing flashes of grit and humour. In the vast nightclub Berghain, which was previously an electrical power plant, she finds “the dancefloor is the seabed and I am scuba-diving”. With Berlin about 200km from the sea, she seeks out water in swimming pools, lakes and saunas. She recalls how, while getting sober back home, she would take boat trips around the islands and swim in the sea to gaze at the life underwater. Liptrot brings the same sharp eye to the urban landscape that she did to the wild environs of Orkney, reporting both on what she sees and the ways it is filtered through her imagination.

Hearts and futures can turn on a single afternoon or an accepted invitation – but more often lead to nothing much themselves.” She makes no bones about her loneliness and her need for physical connection: “Asking for new friendship is hard. “I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go,” she writes. Liptrot moves to Kreuzberg, an arty district in Berlin where, along with watching birds, we find her doing yoga, loitering in cafes, searching for raccoons and obsessively tracking the lunar cycles. Where The Outrun chronicled her battles with addiction and her recovery on the islands of Orkney where she grew up, this feels like a more experimental project, a document of a liminal year in which her interior and exterior lives are keenly felt and recorded.Īt its heart is a yearning for new experiences, and for love and connection, with all the vulnerability that entails This book is not as substantial as its predecessor, though that is not a criticism. It is a slim, impressionistic, often melancholy work that, along with following her adventures in a new place, grapples with ideas of solitude, romance and a life lived simultaneously online and off. The Instant is the author’s follow-up to her Wainwright prize-winning debut The Outrun (now being made into a feature film with Saoirse Ronan), and ostensibly tells of a year spent living in Germany, though this isn’t a straightforward travelogue. For Liptrot, birdwatching is the ultimate antidote to scrolling on her phone, forcing her eyes to refocus and look into the distance. But she buys a pair of secondhand binoculars and goes out in search of hooded crows, known as “hoodies” back in Scotland, and goshawks, numbers of which have recently increased across the city. “I came for people, not birds,” she writes in her new memoir. W hen Amy Liptrot moved to Berlin, she didn’t expect to spend so much time birdwatching.

The outrun by amy liptrot