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Book Cover for: The Instant, Amy Liptrot

The Instant

Amy Liptrot

Hardcover
Regular price$26.00With free membership trial$13.0050% off your first book+ Free shipping
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Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 8 reviews on

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Waterstones - The Best books of 2022: Biography

'I loved this book' Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path
'Utterly absorbing' Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden

Wishing to leave behind the quiet isolation of her Orkney island life, Amy Liptrot books a one-way flight to Berlin. Searching for new experiences, inspiration and love, she rents a loftbed in a shared flat and looks for work. She explores the streets, nightclubs and parks and seeks out the city's wildlife - goshawks, raccoons and hooded crows. She looks for love through the screen of her laptop.

Over the course of a year Amy makes space hoping for the unexpected. And it comes with an erotic jolt, in the form of a love affair that obsesses her.

The Instant is an unapologetic look at the addictive power of love and lust. It is also an exploration of the cycles of the moon, the flight paths of migratory birds, the mesmerising power of Neolithic stonework and the trails followed by a generation who exist online.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Canongate Books
  • Publish Date: Sep 6th, 2022
  • Pages: 192
  • Language: English
  • Edition: Main - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.60in - 5.40in - 1.00in - 0.65lb
  • EAN: 9781838854263
  • Categories: β€’ Personal Memoirsβ€’ Animals - Birdsβ€’ Dating

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About the Author

Liptrot, Amy: - Amy Liptrot is the author of The Outrun, which was a Sunday Times bestseller. She writes columns and reviews for various magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Spectator, and recently presented the BBC Radio 4 series The New Anatomy of Melancholy. The Outrun was awarded the Wainwright Prize and the PEN Ackerley Prize, and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. It was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and featured on the BBC Radio 2 Book Club. Amy is currently based in West Yorkshire, UK.


@amy_may @amymayyyy

More books by Amy Liptrot

Book Cover for: The Outrun: A Memoir, Amy Liptrot
Book Cover for: The Instant, Amy Liptrot

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: The Irish Times
The Irish Times
3 years

"Refreshingly honest, the author is concerned with truth as opposed to perception. A noticer of places, people and words...The Instant is full of these kinds of strange, perfect descriptions by a writer who knows how to elide multiple worlds to illuminate the truths within each."

– Sarah Gilmartin is a book critic.
irishtimes.com
Mentioner image for: Fiona Sturges
Fiona Sturges
@FionaSturges
3 years

Fiona Sturges is a journalist.

For health reasons I've been working very little lately but the (exceedingly slow) resurrection begins here: my review of The Instant, Amy Liptrot's impressionistic and intimate memoir of a year spent in Berlin. https://t.co/KPWKwFq68X

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: 𝘌𝘳π˜ͺ𝘡𝘩𝘒𝘀𝘢𝘴
𝘌𝘳π˜ͺ𝘡𝘩𝘒𝘀𝘢𝘴
@adoughtyimages
2 years

poet, writer, woodsman, photographer, and if that wasn't enough .. Autistic

I'm listening to The Instant by Amy Liptrot @amy_may and I am immersed. A beautiful weave of nature, love and life, I don't want it to end. As a "digital nomad" who does not have the courage to venture far from my corner, I find it wonderfully inspiring. #booktwt #BookTwitter

twitter.com
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Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

A book of rare power. Part heartbreaking love story, part pin-sharp exploration of relationships in the digital age, The Instant is an intense and intensely beautiful book about connection, longing and the gravitational power of nature, and human nature, on the heart--ROB COWEN
Sensuous and full of promise-- "Guardian"
Wildness lurks in the edges of this book - nature in its more feral state, and unashamed eroticism. I gulped this slim, powerful, ravishing little book down in one--CAL FLYN
An astute exploration of longing and loneliness in a time when we've never been better connected or more distant. Most of all, I admire Amy's patience. The Instant is proof of what good can come from time, and waiting, and the thinking that accompanies both. I loved it--ALICE VINCENT
Experimental-- "Financial Times"
A devoted observer of nature . . . The style of this book is elliptical, often reading like a diary . . . it offers a rich map of its author's inner experience, flitting from thought to image and back to Google Earth again ... This memoir is about nature, lust and love but also redemption and healing, the story of someone who changed her life-- "Irish Independent"
Sarah Brocklehurst's Brock Media optioned Amy Liptrot's first book The Outrun and will produce the film alongside Saoirse Ronan, Jack Lowden and Dominic Norris under their new shingle Arcade Pictures. Ronan is also set to star in the adaptation.
Liptrot's prose is beautifully wrought, with plenty of observations that fellow members of the digital dating pool will empathise with-- "iNews"
Glorious-- "Times Literary Supplement"
The Instant is magical, it is sexy, it is redolent of the natural world and it is all the things that makes Liptrot one of the most unique voices writing today . . . We simply cannot get enough Liptrot in our lifetimes. I want her to write a book every year-- "Caught by the River"
Contemplative, with flashes of grit and humour . . . remarkable-- "Guardian"
Lyrical . . . A beautiful, searching account of a woman's quest for fulfilment-- "Buzz Magazine"
Experimental and daring . . . honest . . . this book has joys, and Liptrot has a graceful prose style-- "Scotsman"
Experimental and poetic . . . [Liptrot's] an exquisite nature writer-- "Orcadian"
Liptrot excels at extrapolating scientific metaphors out into emotional terrain and turning her astute insights into prose that possesses a lyrical sheen. Post-pandemic, when so much has become 'remote', The Instant feels as though it's reporting from the frontiers of digital nomadism, describing how many of us might live, revelling in new freedoms while simultaneously drifting and weightless, aching for something to pin us down and hold us in place-- "Geographical"
Forensically examining love, loneliness, desire, compulsion and technology, The Instant is a short, beautiful and sometimes brutal book that illuminates the defining human experience of now: connection and disconnection. If Amy Liptrot is a nature writer, then it is human nature that occupies her. She is a literary warrior--BENJAMIN MYERS
The Instant is a powerful and poignant memoir of Berlin, love and the nature of heartache. I relished the intensity of this and devoured it in a single sitting--JAMES CANTON
Compelling and brave. An intimate glimpse at what it means to long for connection, and the pain that follows an abrupt severance of love. Pushing the bounds of memoir, it experiments with form to capture what it is to be a desiring woman in the digital age. It is stylish and full of heart--LILY DUNN
Compelling . . . Another beautifully blended memoir, and one of the most nailed accounts of what heartbreak feels like that I have ever read-- "The Bookseller, Editor's Choice"
Everything you'd want it to be . . . Liptrot is a fantastic nature writer, and whether she's writing about searching for a racoon in the city or searching the internet for her ex-boyfriend, her approach is the same. You feel like you're exploring landscapes with her, feeling as riveted, lost and curious as she does-- "The Crack"
Amy Liptrot's latest book manages to be even more experimental and daring than her acclaimed debut-- "Scotsman"
Beautiful . . . brilliant . . . The truest thing I've read in a long time. It feels revelatory to read serious, thoughtful writing on the sorts of experiences that so rarely receive it. . . The Instant is the most elegant examination of the internet's distance pain I have ever read-- "New York Times"
Intoxicating, generous and refreshingly original. The way Liptrot weaves her inner life with the natural world and the digital world is utterly absorbing. This book is so alive and so wild--LUCY JONES
Elegant, melancholic and deeply yearning, The Instant captures something vital about our age: its strange dislocations and connections. I drank it in--KATHERINE MAY
Enthralling and instinct-sharpening-- "New Statesman"
A slim, luminous account of living and loving in Berlin, picking up where The Outrun left off-- "Sunday Times"
I loved this book, such an intimate portrayal of emotional landscapes and the pull of the moon - it's one I'll return to often--RAYNOR WINN
Brilliant on the addictive bliss of romance . . . [The Instant is] a parable about the quicksands of internet dating, and a survivors' handbook 'for the heartsick'-- "Telegraph"

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: The Irish Times
The Irish Times
3 years

"Refreshingly honest, the author is concerned with truth as opposed to perception. A noticer of places, people and words...The Instant is full of these kinds of strange, perfect descriptions by a writer who knows how to elide multiple worlds to illuminate the truths within each."

– Sarah Gilmartin is a book critic.
irishtimes.com
Mentioner image for: Fiona Sturges
Fiona Sturges
@FionaSturges
3 years

Fiona Sturges is a journalist.

For health reasons I've been working very little lately but the (exceedingly slow) resurrection begins here: my review of The Instant, Amy Liptrot's impressionistic and intimate memoir of a year spent in Berlin. https://t.co/KPWKwFq68X

twitter.com
See more