THE WILD SILENCE
RAYNOR WINN Michael Joseph, 288pp, £14.99
Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, written in her mid-fifties, had the wild and unexpected success that writers dream of. And this triumph seemed all the more inspiring (and poignant) as it was a memoir of lives destroyed being slowly put together again. Winn and her husband Moth lost everything to a bad investment and days later learned that Moth had
a terminal illness. Their response? They set off to walk the 630-mile coastal path. For her second book, Winn revisits the theme of walking but the couple are no longer homeless as an admiring reader has given them a rundown Cornish farm to rewild.
Adrian Tempany in the Observer noted that settling down is a challenge. No sooner are they in their new farm but ‘they’re off again, to Iceland to walk its southern highlands. As the book opens, Moth has begun a degree, but in the confines of a converted chapel they are renting near Fowey, and without a physical connection to the land, he is deteriorating. Winn already feels that “a dark sense of enclosure had borne down on me and I had to get out.”’ In I-online, Rory Sullivan enjoyed the ‘wide-eyed wonder’ of Winn’s chronicle of rewilding, ‘beautifully describing the visits of deer, toads, curlews and herons, as well as the apple orchard from which monks once made cider’.
In the Times, Cathy Rentzenbrink was among many who found the book, like its predecessor, at heart a deep love story: ‘It is mainly about her enduring passion for Moth, the “wild, unstoppable” man who has spent his life turning left when told to go right and who has always been most himself in the wide embrace of the natural world.’