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The Salt Path opens under the weight of catastrophe. Within the space of days, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth lose their farm, their livelihood, and any sense of security - all while Moth receives a diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration, a terminal neurological condition. Homeless, nearly penniless, and facing a future that seems to be shrinking by the hour, the couple make an impulsive decision: they will walk the 630 miles of England's South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, carrying everything they own on their backs.

It is a premise almost too dramatic to believe - and, as it turns out, that instinct deserves attention. A 2025 investigation by The Observer alleged that key elements of the book's foundational story were misrepresented, including the circumstances of the couple's homelessness and aspects of Moth's diagnosis. Winn - whose real name is Sally Walker - has strenuously denied the claims, calling the reporting "grotesquely unfair," but Penguin paused publication of her fourth book, and a Sky documentary followed. For anyone picking up The Salt Path now, this controversy is impossible to set aside entirely.

Taken purely as a piece of writing, the book has real strengths. The descriptive passages are its high point - Winn captures the coastal landscape with a naturalist's eye and a poet's instinct, evoking the wildness of clifftop paths, the shifting moods of the sea, and the raw beauty of sleeping rough in ancient terrain. The physical detail rings true for anyone who has shouldered a heavy pack up a steep trail: the aching joints, the inadequate sleeping bags, the grim arithmetic of rationing instant noodles against a dwindling budget.

Threaded through the journey is a portrait of homelessness that, whatever its autobiographical accuracy, raises genuinely important points about society's reflexive contempt for people without a fixed address. These observations land with force, though some encounters with sneering strangers feel a little too neatly shaped for narrative effect.

At its core, The Salt Path presents itself as a love story - Raynor and Moth's relationship tested by exhaustion, fear, and grief but never broken. There is humour too, dry and self-deprecating, that prevents the narrative from tipping into relentless hardship. But the claim that the walk itself reversed Moth's neurological symptoms always sat uneasily, even before the controversy - extraordinary and moving if true, but never substantiated in a way that fully satisfies.

The factual questions now hanging over the book fundamentally change how it reads. A memoir asks for trust in a way that fiction does not, and once that trust fractures, every too-convenient anecdote and every dramatic coincidence starts to look different. The Salt Path remains a vivid, often moving account of landscape, endurance, and human resilience - but whether it belongs on the memoir shelf or somewhere closer to fiction is a question its author has yet to convincingly answer.