Hi @RomanMum , I looked up my reviews of Raynor Winn's three books and they were pretty favourable. I like books about walking and would have read further books she published - I've heard mention of the Thames Path and the Coast-to-Coast Path. I've done the former and am interested in doing the latter, and that would have been enough for me to pick them up.
Okay, I can't resist - here are my original reviews:
57. The Salt Path, Rayner Winn
I really enjoyed this - written by a woman who has just lost her home and income, and whose husband has been diagnosed with a degenerative illness. They've lost everything. Not knowing what to do, they simply start walking, undertaking more than 600 miles of the South-eastern coastal path [sic - I can't tell east from west, apparently]. Imagine Cheryl Strayed's Wild, only with a middle-aged couple and set in England. One minute you're communing with nature, the next minute a dog-walker is glaring at you. Her despair and disbelief come across strongly, and also how important it is to just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
62. The Wild Silence, by Raynor Winn
A bit of a hotchpotch aiming at cashing on the success of The Salt Path (which I actually did like, mostly). We get childhood memories (father killing rats back on the farm), a rather uncomfortable account of her mother's death, information about their renovation of a farmhouse (fair dues to them, the mould and mice would have put me off no matter how nice the views) and an account of a hiking trip to Iceland - the nature stuff was a bit repetitive, but I enjoyed it when she turned a beady eye on the younger hikers encountered at campsites.
There's an account of the genesis of The Salt Path that I don't believe for a second - "I wrote it just for my husband as an act of love, no thought of it being read by anyone else, but then my daughter read it and said 'You have to do something with it!' 'Like put it in a binder, you mean?' I asked in my unworldly way. 'No, send it to a publisher!' and then the next minute shy little child of nature me was sitting in a publishers' office while they insisted on publishing it, changing only the title". Nope.
There is a fair amount of her being curled in a ball while the forces of nature throb around her. I got a bit weary of her self-image as a delicate little thing trustingly following her Magnificent Hunk of a Husband. All the same, despite my cynicism, there is something touching when she looks at the older man, weakened by chronic illness, and sees in him the young man she first loved, decades ago. Despite the self-dramatization, it feels like there is something real in there.
116. Landlines, by Raynor Winn
If you liked The Salt Path, you'll like this, and if you didn't, you won't. Again the author and her husband head out on a long walk, this time from Scotland heading south. This was in 2021, so we have references to lockdown, Brexit, Scottish independence, the heatwave and environmental doom. I love walking and accounts of walking, blisters, manky socks and all, so swallowed it down whole, notwithstanding the self-romanticizing: a few weeks camping in Scotland become "I have lived amongst eagles and stags" and sages are forever popping up out of the mist with gnomic utterances that encourage our heroine to struggle on despite her leaking boots. I counted five occasions where strangers either recognized her as Famous Author Raynor Winn or else didn't recognize her but randomly started enthusing about The Salt Path. Pardonable pride though - hell, I would.
I mock, slightly, but did feel like I'd had a good bracing walk.