But what you describe (nature author where walks are mixed with meditations on social issues) is very much where her brand sits now. It was only TSP that had the gripping ‘hook’ of the sudden homelessness plus Tim’s diagnosis spurring the walk (during which, depending on one’s perspective, they are either genuinely homeless or sort of cosplaying homelessness).
TWS is a much more ‘difficult second album’ book, in which Tim’s worsening health after the end of the walk is cobbled together with her mother’s death, meditations on her childhood, the offer to rewild the cider farm (which is also supposed to rewild Tim), and, completely arbitrarily, the walk in Iceland.
Landlines, which I haven’t finished, is even odder. Life on the cider farm hasn’t worked for Tim’s health, he struggles to do a local two mile walk and falls in the orchard, so Sally starts leaving out guides to the brutally difficult Cape Wrath trail. When they get there, Sally’s boots are agony and they can’t access most of the path, so they walk a different one, kind of. And then keep going south on different trails, with bits of cycling and taxis, apparently because Tim doesn’t want to stop, and despite Raynor’s feet being in a bad way, she loves him too much to say ‘I’m in agony, let’s get the train home’. And bits of meditation on the right to roam, wild camping, Scottish independence and Brexit.
Assuming that Tim is definitely ill, even if the diagnosis was indefinite and retrofitted to the TSP timeline, I bet she’s sorry she was so specific about the condition. She’s now stuck with having to come up with reasons why a dangerously ill man, who at one point can’t walk two miles on roads near home, is suddenly striding along famously difficult trails in very remote areas, far from any medical intervention, when he doesn’t have to.