I can't believe she did that!

On Raynor Winn and her fraudulent memoir, The Salt Path

Well it’s easy to say in hindsight, after something has been exposed as a fraud, that you never liked it, but I never liked The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. Can I say that - because I should also admit that I never got very far into the book after the tone of writing put me off, not to mention it being marketed with such a redemptive arc, from despair to heartwarming. I like my worlds less clearcut; my own feelings as a reader less stage-managed.

I still bought a copy though. In short, it’s a memoir of how the author and her husband, when faced with later life homelessness, poverty and terminal illness, set off walking hundreds of miles around the English coastline. They go from sleeping in a tent on a cliff to being saved by the heartwarming kindness of strangers. And the husband magically starts to feel better, despite being ‘fatally’ ill with something that should, by now, have killed him years ago.

It sold millions of copies, and not many books sell in the actual millions - that’s really not as common as you might think. You can enter the bestseller lists in the UK for one week after selling four thousand copies, sometimes fewer.

Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs starred in the very recent film of The Salt Path and the author has published two sequels, with a fourth book due out later this year, which I am sure is about to get cancelled and people’s pre-orders will have to be refunded. If this doesn’t happen, I’ll be astonished, and I say this as someone who also published a memoir with Penguin Random House and is feeling quite weird about the whole thing.