Walking with my sister recently, we bought takeaway cuppas in a waterside coffee shop to sustain us for the return route. On the shelf of donate-for-charity books by the counter was a pristine copy of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (2018) which I hadn’t heard of at the time although it’s actually a runaway best seller. “You should read that” my sister said. “It’s really good both on adversity and on the South West Coast Path”. So we put something in the RNIB box and I took the book.

And I’m very glad I did because it’s the most uplifting book I have read in a very long time. Raynor Winn’s husband, Moth, has just been diagnosed with a  terminal illness; corticobasal degeneration (CBD) which is similar to Parkinson’s Disease. And, though error and misfortune, they are suddenly homeless and penniless in their fifties. It could very easily be yet another misery memoir. In fact it’s anything but.

Rather than demanding a council house or throwing themselves on the mercy of friends they decide,  very much against doctor’s advice, to attempt the 630 mile South West Coast Path with two backpacks and a flimsy tent. It’s an utterly bonkers decision by any standards but it turns out to be the making of them. They start at Minehead and walk westward, using Paddy Dillon’s book The South West Coast Path as their guide although she constantly jokes against themselves that they rarely achieve anything like his daily mileage.

There are many moments of cold, hunger and anxiety but rarely despair and she is very wryly funny about the characters they meet on the path – especially the young bouncy ones with their expensive equipment who won’t believe how far “the old backpackers” have come. It’s an account of both endurance and determination constantly dogged by, literally, having to count every penny. How many times on the journey did they ask for free hot water and then put their own teabag in it?

In many ways the “hero” of this inspiring memoir is the coast path itself as it winds along the rugged coast of north Somerset, Devon and Cornwall and then – via wet, windy, misty Lands End and The Lizard eastwards towards Dorset. In fact they stopped in south Cornwall and went to live and work on a friend’s farm in another part of the country for a few months. When they returned to walk the last few hundred miles (in the opposite direction) from Poole, it feels like a homecoming. On one level this is a travel book (think Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods or Tom Chesshyre’s From Source to Sea) and will probably inspire many people to explore the South West Coast Path especially this year when opportunities to travel abroad seem pretty uncertain.

But The Salt Path is much more than that. This is about two people – who’ve been in love since their teens – striving together to find a way of moving forward under almost unimaginably difficult circumstances.  The underlying love story is what will stay with me, longest I think. This is definitely a happy book not a sad book.

Raynor Winn is now a regular long distance walker who writes about nature and homelessness. I shall soon read her second book The Wild Silence (2020) to find out more about her life before and after her astonishing walk. Such is the immediacy and openness of her writing that  she now feels now like an old friend  with whom I want to catch up.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Blackberry and Wild Rose by Sonia Velton

This is one of those novels which hits you so hard between the eyes that it permanently changes you and your attitude. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) is another example. So, in a different way, is Matthew Kneale’s The English Passengers (2000).  My overriding memory of reading A Fine Balance when it was first published  back in 1995 was being left gasping at the indomitability of the human spirit.  And twenty six years later it had exactly the same life-affirming effect.

We’re in – or near – an unnamed Indian city in 1975 when Indira Gandhi has just declared a state of emergency. Two tailors – uncle and nephew – have lost just about everything in their home village, thanks to corruption and cruelty so they travel into the city to find work. There their lives become tangled up with that of a youngish widow desperately trying to manage a small business and remain independent when everything is stacked against her. The fourth main character is a student who becomes friendly with the tailor nephew and lodges in the widow’s fairly humble home.

It’s a big brick of a book, Dickensian in its scope and proportions. Mistry gradually unwinds the back stories of all four, introducing as he goes a large colourful cast of minor characters such as Shankar the cheerful, friendly beggar whose body was “adjusted” in babyhood so that, legless he uses a ground level trolley and his boss Beggarmaster who emerges as a more complex character than first appears. Then there’s a professional hair seller, the rent collector and the man with the performing monkeys and children along with various relations and officials.

Beneath all this is a government employing many officious, professionally ruthless, people to “beautify” the city which means clearing out the homeless and – effectively – forcing sterilisations on almost anyone they can round up. The latter is a box ticking exercise and the authorities don’t care much who it is – from men in their eighties to lads in their late teens hoping to marry. And even in the sterilisation camps there is vengeance and vendetta.

And yet, whatever appalling thing befalls Mistry’s characters, this book is not ultimately a tragedy. The titular “fine balance” is between hope and despair and it’s the former which, despite everything, prevails most of the time. It’s a compelling read too. You might emerge from it feeling battered – as I have done twice – but you’ll also feel warm admiration for people who can simply “keep buggering on” with a smile. It’s a page-turner  horror story presented with appealing optimism.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn.

We’re in Tuscany in 1528 where a nun, Alessandra Cecchi, has just died having left instructions that she is not to be undressed. The Mother Superior overrides the old lady’s wishes and commands two young nuns to prepare her body for burial in the normal way. On her body they find a huge tattoo of a snake, starting on her back, encircling her waist and ending with its head and forked tongue pointing into her genitals. How on earth did an elderly nun acquire such a thing?

The rest of Sarah Dunant’s best novel (2003) comprises an explanatory memoir, left by Alessandra in the capable hands of her former black slave and lifelong friend, Erila. She’s bright, feisty, brave and artistically talented but not conventionally attractive. We follow her – the daughter of a prosperous cloth merchant (although there’s a bit of surprise in the mix relating to that) – through the first Medici rule in Florence and then the torture-fuelled horror of the Savonarola years. Along the way she marries for social convenience, safety and because it’s what her family requires. Then there’s the reclusive, troubled man she calls “the painter” from whom she learns much to improve her own art. He is a vital strand in her life. Who exactly is he, you wonder? Most readers will probably work out his identity before the truth is finally revealed and we learn how she came to carry a serpent on her body.

Underpinning all this is a reasonably accurate account of what life in Florence must have been like in the late fifteenth century – and it isn’t pretty. There is also a great deal of intelligent background about art, religion and how the two things complement or confound each other against devastating political power struggles.

The characterisation delights too. Erila is the friend we’d all like to have – frank, sensible, caring and able to use her own independence and courage to make things happen. Alessandra’s husband, the generally decent, reasonable and believable Christoforo is quite something too – he doesn’t want to marry, for reasons which soon become clear, any more than Alessandra does but he needs a wife and child for form’s sake.

I read this book when it was first published nearly 20 years ago and have never forgotten the drama of that opening: the “respectable” old nun and the highly erotic tattoo. Like good cheese or wine it seems to have matured since then and I enjoyed revisiting a fine historical novel which remains fresh and compelling.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry