Landlines
Raynor Winn
(Michael Joseph, £20)
THE timeimmemo-rial power of walking to heal, to comfort and to inspire was the theme of Raynor Winn’s acclaimed first book, The Salt Path. On the same day she was made homeless and bankrupt, her husband, Moth, was diagnosed with the rare disease Corticobasal degeneration, his brain cells dying like sputtering Christmastree lights. Instead of sitting down and weeping, though, the couple decided to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path and see what happened.
That book, visceral, compelling, brutally honest and, above all, hopeful—Moth’s health improved considerably with walking—was a bestseller, which presumably rescued their finances. A kind benefactor offered them a Cornish farm to run, detailed in the more static second book,. Now, they are back on the road, and, from the first page, which finds the indomitable pair stuck on a precipitous path above a roaring waterfall, the reader is again vicariously
