The Salt Path and 2025’s most scandalous books

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But 2025 was also a year when memoirs attracted attention for the wrong reasons. Journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s much-hyped American Canto which, among other things, detailed her “digital affair” with Robert F Kennedy, was called “aggressively awful” a “hate-read” and “insufferable filler” by critics. Despite generating hundreds of column inches of coverage, the book sold fewer than 1,200 copies in its first week.

In September, the New York Times published a story that raised questions over Amy Griffin’s hit memoir The Tell, a book championed by figures including Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon. The book chronicles Tell’s childhood sexual abuse, relying on memories recovered in MDMA therapy sessions.

The Salt Path scandal

Perhaps the biggest literary scandal of 2025, though, concerned Raynor Winn’s memoir The Salt Path. First published in 2018, the book tells the story of Winn and her husband Moth’s 630-mile (1,015km) trek along the UK’s South West Coast Path. In the book, readers learn that the couple lose their home after a failed investment and subsequent legal dispute with a friend. To make things worse, Moth is diagnosed with the terminal neurological disorder corticobasal degeneration (CBD) days later. With seemingly nothing to lose, the couple decide to start walking. By the time they’ve completed their trek, they have been offered a place to live by a stranger and Moth’s symptoms have amazingly started to reverse. 

Readers fell in love with the triumph-over-tragedy narrative, which its publishers described as “unflinchingly honest”. The book has sold more than two million copies and was translated into more than 25 languages. Winn published two successful follow ups, The Wild Silence and Landlines. Spring 2025 saw the release of a film adaptation of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs as the couple.