My first book of 2020 is one I began in 2019, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. The author and her husband, both in their 50s, suddenly find themselves homeless and decide to walk the South West Coast Path in England.

It’s not what one usually decides to do in such a situation, so right from the start I was hooked. And the further I read (I’m less than 50 pages from the end), the more I know that if I were to find myself homeless, walking the South West Coast Path would be something that I would want to do, too.

It’s about how to survive when nothing is going your way, about taking control when it would be far easier to left fate roll you over. It’s about the couple finding the “strip of wildness that was ours” between the rocks and the sea, about feeling both “confined and set free.”

“Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was. Were we searching this narrow margin between the land and sea for another way of being, becoming edgelanders along the way? Stuck between one world and the next. Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death. At the edge of existence.”

Winn may not know the answers (yet), but she certainly has figured out the questions.