Liptrot didn’t become sober until thirty (she started drinking at fifteen), when she returned home trading “disco lights for celestial lights.” A steady, uphill process that replaced her dependence on alcohol to feel “more alive” to getting high on her unique “natural surroundings,” birdlife, and sea life. A world in which you don’t just see shooting stars in the night skies, you see galaxies, planets (four, unbelievably, on one night), moonbows (rainbows caused by the moon’s light), and the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) or what this poetess of Nature calls Merry Dancers. Much of the exotic language – references to the far northern reaches of an ancient landscape, culture, history, and folklore – is otherworldly. If you read to experience new worlds, The Outrun will definitely take you to one. Liptrot chose to spend five winter months on this remote island feeling less alone than she did in London.

Most of the memoir’s Orkney sections are set on the so-called Mainland where the author’s family farm is located, and on one of the northernmost islands, Papay, population seventy. Many are sparsely populated or completely uninhabited. Some 20,000 people are estimated to be living on the seventy islands that comprise the Orkney archipelago. (Her brother, who attended the same university as she did, tried to help until she needed aggressive intervention.) Today, at thirty-five, she’s five years sober. The heart of the memoir takes place on the Orkneys two years after the author made it through an intensive rehab program in London, where she hit rock bottom. Through it all (her parents divorced), Liptrot felt “always loved.” Map of Orkney by Mikenorton, via Wikimedia CommonsBorn during one of her father’s bipolar disorder breakdowns, he endured a mind-boggling fifty-six electroshock treatments.

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