“If we hadn’t done this there’d always have been things we wouldn’t have known, a part of ourselves we wouldn’t have found, resilience we didn’t know we had.”

Raynor and Moth lose their home and find out that he is terminally ill, all within a few days. Finding themselves homeless and having to live on forty pounds a week, they decide to hike the South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset. Carrying only the essentials for survival they embark on a remarkable journey. The Salt Path is an honest look at how even if you lose a home, it can be found and rebuilt again later and in the least likely of circumstances.

I don’t normally read memoirs and I feel weird passing judgement on someones life experiences in book form. I feel an almost compulsive need to give memoirs a five star, regardless of how interesting or well-written it is. Luckily, this one is both interesting and well written. It will give readers a new way of viewing homeless people. I hope this makes readers more sympathetic to the circumstances that make people homeless in the first place and how they respond to them in the future.

This book is not maybe going to be the most action packed novel that you’ll ever read, but if you’re a fan of things like A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson or really any of the comedies geared for older people, like Something’s Got to Give or The Bucket List, this will probably be the correct pace and tone for you. I am not the target audience for those sorts of things, but I still enjoy the somewhat wry humor of them all. The humor was one of the best aspects of this book.

The humor in this book was subtle for the most part. The author didn’t go too far out of her way to make the reader laugh. She wrote the humor in there in such a way it felt natural and realistic, which since this is a memoir, hopefully it did happen this way. It didn’t make me die laughing at any point, but it gave me a few solid chuckles.

Aside for the wry sense of humor, I quite enjoyed the inspirational aspect of this novel. Despite having absolutely awful circumstances given to them they keep going, they keep moving forward. They would argue that they had no choice, but to keep going. But many people in their situation would give up or seek out other options than those that they chose. No, they kept going on their own terms after the decisions were made that they couldn’t control. That, to me at least, is inspirational.

Overall I would recommend this for fans of memoirs, hiking novels, or slower-paced novels about older people. This isn’t to say that people who don’t normally read these things won’t like it, but I’m just being a tad more specific about who I think would like this. Definitely give it a chance at the beginning and wait till they are solidly on the trail. Because their legal problems, while sad, are not the most interesting aspects of this novel. The Salt Path is great for a nice couch vacation to the south of England.

Have you read The Salt Path? Do you want to walk the South West Coat Path now? Let me know in the comments below!

Important Bits:
Length: 288 pages
Published: March 22nd 2018 by Michael Joseph
Also by: This is her debut novel.