The Tangles
Amy Liptrot
Available as Hardback
11 February 2027
The third book from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Outrun and The Instant is an enchanting love letter to seaweed, showing how one plant can transform the world
One bright autumn morning while swimming off the east coast of England, Amy Liptrot’s fingers wrap around some fresh fronds of kelp. So begins her encounter with seaweed, one that becomes a quest to understand this magnificent life form. Following her curiosity for this undersea world - and determined not to lose her appetite for adventure even with two small children in tow - she moves north to the remote island of Papay, Orkney. There in the depths of winter her young boys come to experience the island life where she grew up, and as spring comes around they spend more time with their elderly grandfather.
What Amy discovers is how critical seaweed is to life on earth. Marine algae produce more oxygen than all land plants combined and absorbs carbon more effectively than trees. Seaweed improves water quality, it can help restore fish stocks and make bioplastic. It’s good as food, fuel and fertiliser. Our world wouldn’t be the same without it and might be our planet’s secret weapon.
With her adventure-hungry, lyrical and wind-swept style, Amy records how her family grows and recedes in its new coastal nook. Blending ecology, history and memoir, The Tangles chronicles how paying closer attention the world around her, changes the way Amy moves through the tangles of her own life.
“What a joy to plunge into The Tangles - not just into the slippery, little understood, endlessly mesmerising world of seaweed, but into the life of a woman, “moored by a healthy obsession”, as she navigates love and loss and the routines of small children amid the battering of sea and wind. To bathe in gorgeous prose and learn so much at the same time is bliss”
Sally Magnusson
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”The Tangles is the third in Amy Liptrot’s beautiful and intimate trilogy of travelling through life with a deep bond to the more-than-human world. Refreshingly frank and with crystalline sentences, The Tangles is both fascinating and captivatingly moving from start to finish. Amy Liptrot’s writing is alight with all the life force of seaweed itself and brilliantly illustrates how a dedication to curiosity can be a steadying force”
Sally Huband
”Praise for Amy Liptrot: [The Outrun is] an astonishingly beautiful book. Amy makes most nature writing seem flat and pedestrian. Her account of her addiction and recovery is electric, sexy, immediate and raw, leaving the reader reeling in her wake … This is a luminous, life-affirming book, and I have no doubt that I’ll be pressing it into people’s hands for years to come”
Olivia Laing
”[The Instant is] a wild, wind-lashed book, and you come away from reading with the taste of salt spray on your lips”
Evie Wild
new York Times
“It’s Liptrot’s aptitude for marrying her inner-space with wild outer-spaces that makes her such a compelling writer”
guardian
Amy Liptrot
Amy Liptrot is the author of The Outrun and The Instant, which were both Sunday Times bestsellers. She writes columns and reviews for various magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Orcadian and 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. In 2024 it was adapted by Amy and Nora Fingscheidt into a BAFTA and London Critics’ Circle Film Awards-nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan. Amy’s second book, The Instant, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
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