to think this couple in the guardian are strange and this was not an appropriate subject for a book?

We know this couple and honestly hope the book sells well, the terror and fear they went through was horrific. Just awful.

Harper's own website page is pretty chaotic with January 28 and 30 October right next to each other?! Feel a bit bad for the 5 people who bought the book already (hardly impressive considering how much reach the story got)

If you click their bookstore links, some of the pages are also bizarre, with Waterstones listing the book as in stock and available to be shipped within a day: https://www.waterstones.com/book/9780008802820

It doesn’t add up, clunky narrative, like a bad Netflix drama. I read the Guardian article, but wouldn’t want to read or pay to read the book, if it ever materialised. Like a pp said, lots of gaps. If you carefully read the article analytically, it doesn’t gel.

Yes, thanks but in product details:

Place of Publication:
London

Publication Date:

28/01/2027

Yes! I recall the July date on the (now gone) Guardian Bookstore page. That obviously makes sense based on their giant PR launch a few weeks back.

EDIT: How odd, the Guardian Bookstore page is now back! It was definitely 404 broken link earlier. But launch date is still gone and says Available but with no purchase link.

It was an article in the Times as well, but a normal article, an interview rather than a synposis

I remember that Harper had the publication date as 16 July 2026 when this thread was started. Curiouser and curiouser ...
ADAPTED from Stalked by Amanda Hut­ton & Richard Bur­ton (HarperE­le­ment, £10.99) to be pub­lished July 16. © Amanda Hut­ton & Richard Bur­ton 2026.

Interesting! The blurb at the bottom of the article linking to the Guardian bookshop is also gone. That was why I assumed they promoted it so hard because they get a share from books sold through the shop. This was definitely the page which is gone now:

https://guardianbookshop.com/stalked-9780008802820

Original release date was October 27 2026 (still up on Amazon.com) but many other pages have pushed it back to Jan 28 2027. Maybe there were so many AI accusations that they had to go take a look, although that would have been obvious to any proofreader as well. HarperCollins are too big to risk getting caught in an AI scandal.

Doesn’t he put something on social media about the bike and how the older couple are suckers/mugs ie implying heavily that he used their money for it?
But that doesn’t answer the question of how did they acquire the land if he spent the money on a bike instead.

Yes, I wonder .... here is another parallel with The Salt Path author - the fourth book has been kicked into the long grass by the publisher .... easier than confronting the problem?

I found it odd too, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on; there just seem to be gaps in information/logic.
I also don't quite see how you can make a whole book out of it; I felt like the whole story was told in that one extract. Unless I'm massively missing something.

I agree it had a very dodgy, tacky, exploitative vibe and I was surprised it was serialised in the guardian - not least because it’s quite obviously written by generative AI.. not something I’d imagine the guardian would want to promote. The imprint it’s publishing with also looks.. not high quality and ethically rigorous! Weird but I do think the guardian is quite shit in general these days.

The plot thickens... the book has gone from 'published by...' to 'release date January 2027'. I wonder what happened?

Thanks for the spoiler @HildegardVonBingham

Because that’s totally how that works…..🙄

In my view, a large majority of books, fiction or non-fiction, are an attempt to make sense of trauma.

Having skimmed bits of it again, it does seem to have a quite peculiar, disjointed style, with some parts at odds with the way others are written.

It doesn't seem to flow that well, and in some ways, reminds me of that game called Consequences... but if everyone had written a poorly written individual paragraph of the same story.🤔😬

Victims do not owe their abusers silence.

Apart from the usual legal constraints around libel or official secrets etc. it seem a anyone can write a book on more or less on any topic but that doesn't mean other people have to publish it, but it or or read it. I am however astonished by what sells nowadays.

Press coverage of the inquest says .. the man, an ex-Para, had been diagnosed with severe psychotic depression with a history of suicidal ideation, and that his father, who was in the SAS, had died by suicide in his childhood.

(This is part of a quote upthread with back information about the person who undertook the campaign of threats and sabotaging of the land).

I put in an admiring word for Caradog Prichard (correct spelling this time) earlier. A Mabinogion alarm bell is ringing now with parts of the tale of Branwen and the Welsh figure of Efnysien. Owen Sheers' 'White Ravens' is also a beautiful read, putting these tales into a 20-21st C setting. From his version in English (so not going on the original), Efnysien is the trickster-borderline psychopath but made that way with a permanently broken mind because of brutalisation as a soldier. This is not to excuse anyone's actions or to wax lyrical with a 'See, the source of it all is Medieval, no less, this plays out again' but there is newish literature out there that, in my opinion, takes a place on the other end of the scale from the way this is presented.

"Sometimes we'd talk about it softly over breakfast, sometimes we'd sit outside in silence, letting the wind and birdsong fill the gaps that words couldn't reach. We were changed, both of us. Scarred, yes, but also sharpened, more awake to the fragility of things - the land, the sky, the small mercies we'd once taken for granted. As the autumn light faded over the hills, Amanda stood beside me on the field we'd once fought so hard for, her hand in mine"

I mean come ON!! This isn't the Year 7 creative writing competition

That's definitely plausible but the part of their story that makes no sense is that Collins showed up with a brand new Harley Davidson. The older man "ran back to the house to Google the price of the bike" which came out as £25,000 and it was clearly bought with "his money". That scene is utterly bizarre.

Was it a totally fake scene shoehorned into the memoir to elicit sympathy or generate some kind of visual dramatic moment? Surely Googling the price of motorcycle is hardly a crazy epiphany. How did he know for sure the Collins spent exactly that money on the bike rather than just pocketing it and having spent it on something else?

If Collins bought a bike then that means they didn't spend the 25K on the paddock. Surely Byrn would have interfered by then since he didn't get paid? If they did spend the 25K on the land and simply didn't pay them back, where the did money for the bike come from?? Utterly baffling plot holes

And I'm not a expert in motorcycles but I'm positive the cost of a HD can vary hugely. Just like every single car brand can vary depending on whether you buy it second hand, at what mileage, what model etc. How on earth did that older man find a model that costs exactly 25K, conveniently corresponding with the same amount he lent them to buy land?

Awful! But it did remind of my eldest son a few years ago when he was about 9. He tasted something I made for him and said it tasted of sadness🤣🤣 He was probably right.

I read it yesterday because it popped up on my facebook page being pushed by the guardian. The comments underneath the article were rather entertaining and picking up on the writing style.

It interested me though and I did some googling. It does appear to be verifiable and all rather strange. I can’t understand why the perpetrators had such a vendetta that they firebombed them. There must have been some very complex mental health issues.

I also found a press reader version of the story where the couple explained why they wanted to move to Wales. How they lived in an area with lots of chemicals on the land, their dogs kept getting cancer, they wanted to get away from this poisonous place etc. I did think, bet you didn’t disclose all that on your house seller pack!

Definite shades of Saltpath, but with some actual truth behind it.