The Instant
Amy Liptrot
Available as Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
The Sunday Times-bestselling book from the multi-award-winning author of The Outrun – on the ecology of love and heartbreak, the urban environment and the digital age
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING
Wishing to leave behind the isolation of her Orkney island life, Amy Liptrot books a one-way flight to Berlin. She rents a loftbed in a shared flat and starts to look for work – and for love – through the screen of her phone.
The Instant tells of the momentous year that follows, encountering the city’s wildlife in the most unexpected places, tracing the cycles of the moon, the flight paths of migratory birds and surrendering to the addictive power of love and lust.
“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
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“A slim, luminous account of living and loving in Berlin, picking up where The Outrun left off”
sunday Times
“Brilliant on the addictive bliss of romance … [The Instant is] a parable about the quicksands of internet dating, and a survivor’s handbook ‘for the heartsick’”
telegraph
“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”
Evie Wyld
new York Times
“Elegant, melancholic and deeply yearning, The Instant captures something vital about our age: its strange dislocations and connections. I drank it in”
Katherine May
Amy Liptrot
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_may | @amymayyyy
“The truest thing I’ve read in a long time”
A wonderful review of Amy Liptrot’s The Instant in the New York Times:
“It feels revelatory to read serious, thoughtful writing on the sorts of experiences that so rarely receive it. The book is particularly sharp on the agony of a relationship’s aftermath in a digital age. At one point, Liptrot refers to the German word Fernweh (distance pain), which describes a reverse homesickness that makes you long for somewhere else. The Instant is the most elegant examination of the internet’s distance pain I have ever read.”
Evie Wyld
New York Times
“A lot of nature writing is quite chaste, so I wanted to put the sex into nature writing. So humans as animals, and human instincts, and how the internet and digital technology allows us to amplify our animal instincts is of interest to me, in terms of searching for things, in terms of sexual opportunities, in terms of seasons.”
Amy Liptrot has been interviewed in the Guardian ahead of publication of her new book The Instant. You can also read an extract from the book.
Guardian
