For the month of September Ballymena Book Club are reading The Outrun by Amy Liptrot. The book club is organised by Waterstones in the Fairhill Shopping Centre in Ballymena. The Outrun is a change of direction from our latest books because it is a non-fiction. We tend to stay away from non-fiction, preferring a good old rip roaring story. But a change is as good as a rest so this month we picked this brilliant non-fiction which is also Waterstone’s Non Fiction Book of the Month.
Ballymena Book Club read The Outrun
The Outrun has also just wont his year’s Wainwright Prize:
The Outrun is a tale that addresses a kind of redemption. Amy Liptrot represents something within us all, an individual spinning in the gears of post-millennial life. Consumed by job and city, lost relationships and loneliness, Liptrot’s London-bound alcoholic descent is arrested only by a chance return to Orkney, sometime childhood home and soon-to-be refuge. New technology – in the form of a much-regarded online blog – provides an outlet for her written meditations and the theme of technology and our relationship toward it (sometimes positive, sometimes not) runs through the entire narrative. In time, Orkney – and specifically the remote island of Papa Westray – becomes a practical, living touchstone, its wilderness becoming the perfect liberation from Liptrot’s troubling dependencies.
By perfect symmetry, we’re proud to announce that The Outrun was already our selection for next month’s Non-Fiction Book of the Month so we’ll be supporting this absolutely stunning volume of writing throughout September and beyond. We congratulate our friends at the Wainwright Prize for yet another superb shortlist and arriving at such a powerful overall winner. We’ve all loved The Outrun since it first saw print and it will now surely find the audience it so deserves. (Source)
If you would like to read The Outrun you can pick it up in Ballymena Waterstones. Join the bookclub for a chat on Wednesday 5th October at 7pm.
