Canongate acquires Liptrot's Outrun follow-up

Canongate is to publish The Instant by Amy Liptrot, a book that blends a memoir with nature writing, to explore the "ecology of love".

Liptrot’s second book picks up at the point her debut The Outrun concludes. Wishing to leave island life on Orkney behind, she books a one-way flight to Berlin. The Instant is an account of the year the author spends experiencing this new city. Raccoons, hawks and hooded crows scrabble and swoop through its pages, leading Liptrot on strange safaris through the streets, parks and nightclubs, encounters amplified by the possibilities offered by our digital age. But it is the pursuit of love online that becomes the defining feature of this year of solitude and searching.

Publishing director Francis Bickmore acquired world rights to the book from James Macdonald Lockhart at Antony Harwood Ltd. Canongate will publish it as a lead hardback in January 2022.

The Outrun was awarded the 2016 Wainwright Prize and the 2017 PEN Ackerley Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Prize and the 2017 Ondaatje Prize. It was also a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and featured on the BBC Radio 2 Book Club. Liptrot writes columns and reviews for various magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and Spectator, and also presented the recent BBC Radio 4 series "The New Anatomy of Melancholy".

Commenting on The Instant, Liptrot said: “I have tried to push myself artistically with this book. I want to apply the skills I’ve developed as a nature writer to looking at the city, and people. Canongate are the best publishers around, the team did a great job for The Outrun and I’m proud to continue to be published by them.”

Bickmore added: “Amy’s new book is stop-you-in-your-tracks good. It draws on nature writing and memoir traditions then breaks all their rules as it describes the ecology of love and heartbreak in our digital age. Amy has such curiosity for the world outside and the world within, and her writing has once again taken our breath away. On the back of sales of more than 100,000 copies of The Outrun, Canongate is very excited to be taking this new book to old and new fans alike.”