Amy Liptrot · 2016 · survival

Amy Liptrot's 2016 memoir. After a decade in London that ends badly, she goes back to the Orkney farm she grew up on and to a landscape she had spent her twenties trying to leave. The book alternates between the city she is recovering from and the islands she is walking, swimming and surveying her way across, further north each season.

1. 1
   London

   Ten years in London end with a life she cannot hold together - and after treatment she takes the long journey north to the farm on Orkney where she grew up, without much confidence that going back will be any use.

2. 2
   Stromness

   Back on the Orkney Mainland she helps with the lambing, walks the coast in all weathers and starts swimming in water that is far too cold - reassembling a life out of wind, birds and the discipline of being outside.

3. 3
   Westray

   She takes work for the RSPB surveying corncrakes, driving the northern isles at night listening for a bird that is almost gone - and finds that the counting itself, night after night, is doing more for her than anything else has.

4. 4
   Papa Westray

   She winters alone on Papa Westray, one of the smallest inhabited islands in Britain, with sixty neighbours and the Atlantic - the furthest north the book goes, and the point at which the recovery stops being provisional.