It was written over two winters on Papa Westray, the most north-westerly Orkney island, home to just 70 people. Sometimes I say it’s about a period in my life when I’d returned to Orkney after I got out of rehab in London. Sometimes I say it’s about birds and addiction. Sometimes I say it’s about beauty, sensation and the feeling of cold water on hot skin. When people ask me what the book is about, I seem to tell them different things. It’s slow work but I’m building something that will last, using an ancient practice and linking myself steadily to the land. In work gloves and woollen hat, I’m picking stones from the pile and I can’t be slowed by perfectionism, I just have to get on with laying the stones, using the materials I have. I have to constantly visualise and discriminate, selecting the odd-shaped stones for height and shape to make a 3D jigsaw puzzle. It is irresistible to find parallels between wall building and writing. I build until around 3.30, when it gets too dark to see the stones.Ī dyke is actually two walls, built from local rocks – the grey flagstone that edges the farm breaks into slabs – to be flat on the outer faces, joined at the top by large linking stones and filled in the middle with smaller loose ones. A lot stays the same, however: the wind blows off the sea, Dad’s Clydesdale stallion wanders over, the sun travels its short southern arc. This time, I’m putting myself back together after the end of a relationship, but have been sober for almost five years rather than less than one and have a book about to be published. Then, as well as building a dyke, I was figuring out a life without alcohol.

I realised I was in the same place I was in four years ago, at the time I began writing The Outrun – repairing a wall on the same field at midwinter. I was repairing a section of dyke (as we in Orkney call drystone walls), regularly stopping to watch gannets dive like arrows into the Atlantic, smoke roll-ups and glance at my phone. L ast month, I was back on the farm where I grew up in Orkney, out on a cliffside field.

The outrun amy liptrot review