The Instant
AMY LIPTROT
(CANONGATE, 192 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

In the British countryside you can birdwatch for years without seeing a goshawk. In Berlin you can see several in a week, if you want to. Amy Liptrot did. She lived for a year alongside the birds of Berlin and, as described in her new memoir-novel, The Instant, she lived like the birds too. Like the goshawks congregating among the post-Soviet tower blocks, Liptrot is a transplant – from her beloved, resolutely non-urban Orkney isles, backdrop to her hit debut, The Outrun. Like that of the hooded crows flocking to the traffic islands of the Mitteleuropean capital, hers is a tentative, provisional movement, literally unsettled. Living in sublets and out of a suitcase, she’s come to Berlin, she tells us, to fall in love.