Overview

In The Instant, Amy Liptrot returns after the acclaim of The Outrun with another luminous, deeply introspective memoir—this time shifting from the wild solitude of Orkney to the buzz of urban Berlin. Through heartbreak, technology, and new landscapes, she examines connection and solitude in the modern age, tracing how nature and digital life coexist in the search for belonging.

Writing & Atmosphere

Liptrot’s prose remains spare yet piercingly beautiful. Her Berlin is a living organism—alive with drone lights, rivers, and the hum of screens. The writing moves seamlessly between the physical and the abstract, between the body and the digital world. Every observation feels intimate, tender, and charged with awareness. She writes about loneliness not as failure but as a natural, even creative, state.

There’s a hypnotic rhythm to her sentences—a precision that evokes poetry without losing clarity. The book feels at once grounded and dreamlike, an essay on modern existence written with the patience of a naturalist and the honesty of a diarist.

Voice & Themes

The Instant explores the tension between presence and distraction, between the digital “now” and the slow rhythms of the natural world. It’s a meditation on love, loss, and attention—how easily it can fragment, how fiercely we crave it. Liptrot writes movingly about how modern relationships exist in flux, shadowed by both immediacy and absence.

What Worked

• Intimate honesty: self-examination without self-indulgence.
• Beautiful contrasts: between nature and technology, solitude and connection.
• Evocative sense of place: Berlin seen through a poetic, outsider’s eye.
• Rhythmic prose: every line purposeful, controlled, and luminous.

Minor Quibbles

• The fragmented structure may challenge readers seeking narrative continuity.
• Its quiet introspection can feel emotionally distant at times.

Final Thoughts

Subtle, searching, and exquisitely written, The Instant is a meditation on modern love, loneliness, and the yearning to belong in a connected world. Liptrot’s clarity of vision turns the everyday into something luminous and true.

Rating: ★★★★½☆ (4.5/5)