The Instant – Sunday Times Bestseller

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Leaving behind the quiet containment of island life, Amy Liptrot boards a one-way flight from Orkney to Berlin. She arrives with little more than curiosity and restlessness, renting a loft bed in a shared flat and stepping into a city shaped by movement, intimacy, and chance encounters. Work is uncertain. Connection feels immediate and consuming.

The Instant traces a period of emotional intensity, attentive to how desire can mirror addiction, offering exhilaration alongside loss of control. Love and lust are not softened here, but examined honestly, with their pull and their consequences left intact.

Threaded through the personal narrative is a wider attention to cycles and patterns. The phases of the moon, the routes of migratory birds, ancient stonework, and the digital paths of a generation living online all intersect, suggesting different ways of belonging and escape. The Instant is restless and reflective, a book alive to the tension between freedom and attachment, and to the moments that feel transformative even as they slip, almost immediately, into memory.