They will later separate, for reasons that are typically contested. Her mother seeks solace in religion and joins a group of evangelical Christians. Though her parents are loving and hardworking, her father suffers from manic depression and is prone to unpredictable behaviour.

The family makes a go of it, however, and the childhood Liptrot sketches is for the most part wholesome and contented, if not entirely cloudless. Orkney is an unforgiving place to establish a smallholding, and most southerners don’t last long. Like all incomers, they are regarded with benign scepticism by the locals.

The child of southern migrants, Liptrot is raised on a farm on the Orkney “mainland”, as the largest of the islands is known. Like Macdonald, who returned to falconry following a bereavement, Amy Liptrot approaches the natural world by way of the personal, fusing nature writing with a stark and moving memoir of addiction. Macdonald demonstrated that nature writing can be passionately erudite and beautifully observed, but also viscerally intimate and inseparable from the rawness and disorder of our lived experience. While it was not without its precursors (Olivia Laing's To the River, for instance, charts a similar confluence of personal and natural currents), its influence now seems inescapable.

It tended, too, to be the preserve of writers of a recognisable type (male, donnish, faintly druidical), leading the poet Kathleen Jamie to deride the cult of the “Lone Enraptured Male”.Īll that changed, of course, with the phenomenal success of Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk. It tended, until recently, to come in handsomely produced and gift-friendly volumes, and to take a gently contemplative and often lyrical approach to its subject. We have come to expect more of nature writing than we once did.

The outrun book review