Reading List

Authors Like Amy Liptrot

One winter, newly sober, Amy Liptrot lived alone in the RSPB house on Papa Westray, one of the smallest of the Orkney islands, a house normally used only in summer. She had come home after ten years in London that ended with drink and drugs, the loss of her job, her flat and her boyfriend, and taken a temporary job mapping corncrakes for the RSPB. The Outrun (2016), her first book, braids that recovery with the islands she grew up on: the farm, a father with bipolar disorder, the weather, the seals, cold-water swimming and the night sky. It won the Wainwright Prize in 2016 and the PEN Ackerley Prize in 2017, and became a film with Saoirse Ronan, directed by Nora Fingscheidt, which premiered at Sundance in 2024. The Instant (2022) follows her to Berlin the year after. What readers come to her for is the honesty about addiction without a neat redemption, and the way close attention to a place — birds, tides, light — becomes a way of staying well. The writers below share that: nature writing with a person in it, recovery memoirs that refuse the easy ending, and the northern islands themselves.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Nature writing · Recovery memoir · Orkney and the north · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Amy Liptrot, read Helen Macdonald, whose H is for Hawk also turns a private collapse into close watching of a wild animal, and Kathleen Jamie, the Scottish poet who writes about the same northern coasts and islands. For the drinking half of The Outrun, read Leslie Jamison and Caroline Knapp. Jessica J. Lee's Turning is the book closest to The Instant: a year alone in Berlin, swimming through it.

10 authors like Amy Liptrot

01
Grief, given a task

Helen Macdonald

English · b. 1970 · Nature writer · Costa Book of the Year 2014

After her father, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, died suddenly in 2007, Macdonald bought a goshawk and set out to train her. H is for Hawk tells that story alongside a “shadow biography” of T.H. White, author of The Goshawk, and won both the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year in 2014. Vesper Flights (2020) collects her essays on animals and the natural world.

The book most often shelved beside The Outrun, and for good reason: both are about a woman coming apart and holding herself together through fierce attention to the wild. Macdonald's crisis is grief rather than addiction, and her prose is more literary and more hemmed in by history, but the structure is the same — the animal, the landscape and the self, each explaining the others.

— Lisanne

Every book by Helen Macdonald →

02
The same northern edges

Kathleen Jamie

Scottish · b. 1962 · Poet and essayist

Jamie was born in 1962 and raised in Currie, near Edinburgh. Alongside her poetry, including The Tree House (2004), which won the Forward Prize, and The Overhaul (2012), which won the Costa Poetry Award, she has written the essay collections Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019), many of them set on Scottish islands and coasts. She was Scotland's national poet, the Makar, from 2021 to 2024.

The writer whose territory overlaps most with Liptrot's: islands, seabirds, archaeology, northern light, written by a woman who goes out to look and then reports back plainly. Jamie is calmer and more precise, an observer rather than a confessor, which makes her the natural next step for readers who loved the nature half of The Outrun most.

— Lisanne
Every book by Kathleen Jamie →
03
Orkney's own writer

George Mackay Brown

Scottish · b. 1921 · Poet and novelist

Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney, in 1921 and spent almost his whole life there; Edwin Muir, a fellow Orcadian, published his first poetry collection, The Storm, in 1954. His first novel, Greenvoe (1972), is about a small island community; Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He died in Kirkwall in 1996.

The writer who made Orkney literature before Liptrot made it memoir. Where she writes about the islands as a place to come back to, Mackay Brown writes them as a world in themselves — fishermen, farmers, saints, the sea and the seasons, in short, ballad-like prose. Read him for the long history underneath the farm and the coastline she describes.

— Lisanne
04
One place, known completely

Nan Shepherd

Scottish · b. 1893 · Novelist and poet

Shepherd published three novels between 1928 and 1933, then spent much of her life walking in the Cairngorms, the mountains west of her native Aberdeen. The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s, stayed in a drawer until 1977; its 2011 Canongate edition, with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, found it a new audience. Her portrait has appeared on the Royal Bank of Scotland's £5 note since 2016.

The ancestor of the kind of nature writing Liptrot does: not conquest or adventure, but staying in one place and paying attention until the place changes the person. The Living Mountain is short, sensory and quietly radical, and it explains a good deal of what The Outrun is reaching for when it describes the islands at night.

— Lisanne
Every book by Nan Shepherd →
05
Writers and drink

Olivia Laing

British · b. 1977 · Essayist and novelist

Laing writes nonfiction that combines biography, travel and memoir. The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) is about the link between writing and alcoholism, told through John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver and others; The Lonely City (2016) reads loneliness through artists such as Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol. Her novel Crudo won the James Tait Black Prize.

Laing covers both sides of The Outrun in separate books: landscape and walking in To the River, drink and the people it ruins in The Trip to Echo Spring. She is more essayist than memoirist and keeps her own story at an angle, but the territory — loneliness, alcohol, cities and the places people flee to — is very close to Liptrot's.

— Lisanne

Every book by Olivia Laing →

06
Recovery, from the inside

Leslie Jamison

American · b. 1983 · Essayist

Jamison was born in Washington, D.C. in 1983 and directs the nonfiction programme at Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath combines a memoir of her own drinking and sobriety with a study of writers who drank, from John Berryman to Raymond Carver, and of the recovery stories told in meetings. The Empathy Exams is the essay collection that made her name.

The most searching book about the question The Outrun leaves open: what sobriety is like once the drama of quitting is over, and whether a recovery story can be interesting. Jamison works through it in meetings and libraries rather than on islands, but she shares Liptrot's distrust of the tidy redemption arc.

— Lisanne

Every book by Leslie Jamison →

07
The drinking memoir that came first

Caroline Knapp

American · b. 1959 · Memoirist and columnist

Knapp was a writer and editor at the Boston Phoenix, where she wrote a weekly column. Drinking: A Love Story (1996) describes twenty years of high-functioning alcoholism and her recovery, and became a bestseller. Appetites: Why Women Want, about women's hunger and her own anorexia, was published in 2003, after she died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 42.

Twenty years before The Outrun, Knapp wrote the frankest account of a woman's drinking: not the dramatic fall but the long, competent-looking slide. Her drinking was hidden where Liptrot's was chaotic, but both books are exact about the logic of addiction — the bargains, the relief, the shame — and neither pretends sobriety is simple.

— Lisanne
Every book by Caroline Knapp →
08
Sobriety, with jokes

Mary Karr

American · b. 1955 · Memoirist and poet

Karr grew up in an east Texas oil town; The Liars' Club (1995), about that childhood, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and helped start the memoir boom of the 1990s. Lit (2009) covers her alcoholism, her recovery and her unlikely conversion to Catholicism, and The Art of Memoir (2015) is her guide to the form.

Karr and Liptrot both write about a chaotic family and their own drinking without self-pity, and both are poets of their home ground — East Texas for one, Orkney for the other. Lit is the obvious companion to The Outrun: a woman getting sober, finding something larger than herself to lean on, and being funny about how unlikely that is.

— Lisanne

Every book by Mary Karr →

09
A year in Berlin's lakes

Jessica J. Lee

British-Canadian · Nature writer

Lee was born in Canada, has a doctorate in environmental history and lives in Berlin. Turning: A Swimming Memoir (2017) describes the year she swam fifty-two lakes around Berlin, one a week through every season, after heartbreak left her alone in the city at 28. Two Trees Make a Forest, about her family and Taiwan's mountains, won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction in 2020.

The closest match for The Instant, Liptrot's Berlin book, and for the cold-water swimming in The Outrun: a woman alone in a city, using a physical ritual in the water to get through a bad year. Lee is quieter and more scholarly, folding in the history of the lakes and her own family, but the remedy — repeated immersion in a wild place — is the same.

— Lisanne
10
Wilderness, as memoir

Cheryl Strayed

American · b. 1968 · Memoirist

Wild tells of Strayed's 1995 solo hike of about 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon–Washington border, four years after her mother's death and with almost no backcountry experience. It was the first pick for Oprah's Book Club 2.0 in 2012 and was filmed in 2014 with Reese Witherspoon. Tiny Beautiful Things collects her “Dear Sugar” advice columns.

The best-known book about a young woman in freefall going out into the wild to find her footing, and the comparison readers make most often, especially since both became films. Strayed walks forward through new country; Liptrot goes back to the land she grew up on and stays. Both are unflinching about drugs, sex and self-destruction on the way.

— Lisanne

Every book by Cheryl Strayed →

Where to start if you loved Amy Liptrot

If you want the nature writing first, read Kathleen Jamie.

Findings: islands, birds and northern light, in short essays.

If you want the same shape of story, read Helen Macdonald.

H is for Hawk: a collapse, a wild animal and a long recovery.

If you want the recovery half, read Leslie Jamison.

The Recovering: what sobriety is like after the story of quitting ends.

If you loved The Instant, read Jessica J. Lee.

Turning: alone in Berlin, swimming fifty-two lakes in a year.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Amy Liptrot

Who should I read if I love Amy Liptrot?

Helen Macdonald and Kathleen Jamie are the closest for the nature writing: Macdonald for a personal crisis worked through by watching a wild animal, Jamie for islands, birds and northern coasts. For the addiction and recovery, read Leslie Jamison, Caroline Knapp and Mary Karr. Jessica J. Lee's Turning is the nearest match for The Instant.

What books are like The Outrun?

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk (2014) is the book most often paired with it. For recovery memoirs, read Mary Karr's Lit (2009), Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story (1996) and Leslie Jamison's The Recovering (2018). For Orkney itself, read George Mackay Brown's Greenvoe (1972); for a woman alone in the wild, Cheryl Strayed's Wild (2012).

Is The Outrun a true story?

Yes. The Outrun (2016) is a memoir of Amy Liptrot's return to Orkney, where she grew up on a farm, after years of alcohol and drug use in London. It covers her early sobriety, her work mapping corncrakes for the RSPB and a winter spent on Papa Westray. It won the Wainwright Prize in 2016 and the PEN Ackerley Prize in 2017.

Is there a film of The Outrun?

Yes. The Outrun, directed by Nora Fingscheidt, who co-wrote the script with Liptrot, stars Saoirse Ronan, who also produced it. It was filmed in Orkney in 2022 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024. A stage adaptation by Stef Smith premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in July 2024.

What did Amy Liptrot write after The Outrun?

The Instant (2022) describes the year she spent living in Berlin after the period covered in The Outrun. She also contributed an essay on wild swimming to Antlers of Water, an anthology of Scottish nature writing.

Are there other books about Orkney like The Outrun?

George Mackay Brown, born in Stromness in 1921, is Orkney's best-known writer; start with the novel Greenvoe (1972) or Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Kathleen Jamie's essay collections Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019) include pieces set in Orkney and on other Scottish islands.

Footnotes

  1. Amy Liptrot — Wikipedia
  2. The Outrun — Wikipedia
  3. Kathleen Jamie — Wikipedia
  4. George Mackay Brown — Britannica
  5. George Mackay Brown — EBSCO Research Starters
  6. Jessica J. Lee — Wikipedia
  7. How Jessica J. Lee wrote Turning — CBC Books

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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Every Amy Liptrot Book

The Outrun, The Instant and where to start.

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Who to read after The Recovering.

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Who to read after Wild.

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