Outward Bound from Liverpool: Reading Malcolm Lowry

Weaving together literary criticism, memoir and place-writing, this book takes the reader on an immersive journey through the landscapes – textual and geographical, remembered and reimagined – of the Wirral-born novelist, poet and short-story writer Malcolm Lowry (1909–57). At the same time, it follows the author’s own evolving engagement with Lowry as she uses him to ‘think with’, turning his texts and her readings of them through unexpected angles, exploring questions of place and belonging, exile and home. Moving through the various terrains of Lowry’s life and work – Liverpool and the Wirral peninsula, where he grew up; Dollarton in British Columbia, where he found his always-threatened idyll; the terrain of the archive; and the richly textured, symbolic landscapes of his writing itself – the book offers a compelling, lyrical and often moving account of a sustained readerly engagement with a writer and what it can enable. At the same time, it pays tribute to the humour, beauty and passion to be found in Lowry’s writing, to his deeply felt sense of place and his prescient concern for the natural world. Outward Bound from Liverpool explores how reading can change us, and shows why Malcolm Lowry is a writer very much worth reading – and re-reading – today.