So, what did the publisher actually know?

A long disclaimer and a medical note hint that Penguin had an inkling of problems ahead

- Chloe Hadjimatheou

Back in 2013, when Raynor Winn learned that her husband, Moth, had a terminal neurological condition, she wrote: “I'd been through the choking horror six months earlier, as my Mother fought for breath that wouldn’t come. My sister and I sitting either side of her in the dying room.”

You would be forgiven for not recalling this particular incident in Winn’s memoir, The Salt Path, because it never made it into the book. Those lines are taken from a 2017 pre-publication manuscript, obtained by The Observer, which still carries its original title, Lightly Salted Blackberries.

It appears in her second book, The Wild Silence, published in September 2020, in which she claims it happened years later.

Penguin now says this later account is accurate chronologically but doesn’t indicate whether it had requested the change.

And alongside the year Winn’s mother died there's another anomaly: the date of Moth’s initial diagnosis with a terminal condition.

Winn has said it was in 2013, but a description on the back cover of The Wild Silence, seems to place it later: “In 2016, days before they were unjustly evicted from their home, Raynor Winn was told her husband Moth was dying.”

A medical letter released by Winn in an attempt to answer some of the questions raised by The Observer’s investigation into