From the acclaimed author of The Outrun—“full of lucid self-discovery and shimmering prose” (The New York Times—a memoir of discovery, return, and a deep fascination with seaweed.

“I wonder if seaweed might be the antidote to the internet. I want to learn about one subject in great depth rather than messing around with many subjects in the shallows. I want to be moored by a healthy obsession.” 

Raised on the Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland, Amy Liptrot has always been drawn to the sea. After years away in a town in England, she returns to the archipelago and settles on the remote island of Papay, seeking to reclaim her roots and provide a simpler life for her family. The slow way of life attunes her to the natural world, particularly to life beneath the surface of the sea, and she finds herself increasingly attentive to the tangles—the Orcadian term for kelp forests. Clad in her wetsuit and neoprene hood, she snorkels Papay’s intertidal zone and studies its dancing patches of seaweed: bulbous purple laver, flamboyant red dulse, balloons of brown wrack.

Moored by this “healthy obsession,” she befriends other seaweeders—sharp-eyed beachcombers, culinary foragers, pioneers of seaweed farming who teach her about the revitalization of the once-abandoned kelp industry and how it could mitigate climate change. As she deepens her connection to these islands, Liptrot also finds inspiration to navigate the tangles of her own life—her fight for sobriety, her father’s decline and dementia, and the messiness of raising two young boys.

Blending ecology, history, and memoir, The Tangles is an evocative introspective exploration of the powerful connection between our inner and outer worlds and what it means to be at home.