Costa book awards shortlist memoir of homeless couple's coast walk

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn is acclaimed by judges as ‘an absolutely brilliant story about the human capacity to endure’

A British woman’s account of how she and her terminally ill husband embarked on a 630-mile walk along the South West Coast Path after being made homeless has been shortlisted for the Costa book awards.

Bailiffs were banging on the windows of their Welsh farmhouse when Raynor Winn, then 50, came up with the idea to pack a few belongings into rucksacks and set out from Minehead along the coastal path. Her husband Moth was diagnosed with a rare degenerative brain disease but the couple had nowhere else to go.