Tuesday 16 August 2022 12:49 AM RICHARD KAY: Author Nicholas Evans' Horse Whisperer seduced the world trends now

For a celebrated storyteller it was a tale that crackled with extraordinary tension.

While rambling over the Scottish estate of his wife's brother and sister-in-law, a visitor picks some wild mushrooms and brings them home to fry them in butter and parsley for the family supper.

A day later, all four of the diners are seriously ill and are raced by ambulance to hospital. Their dinner-table mushrooms had not been edible at all, but were deadly poisonous — and lethal toxins are already ravaging their bodies.

As he hovers between life and death with acute renal failure, the man who has accidentally poisoned his family realises to his horror that each couple's will grants the other custody of their children in the event of death.

Fearing that all their children may soon be orphaned, he calls his solicitor and a new will is couriered to his bedside.

The four battle on, but three are left without functioning kidneys and must endure years of dialysis to stay alive. They need new kidneys and the search for donor matches goes on for three years until the man's grown-up daughter persuades him to accept one of her own and saves his life.

Meanwhile, his wife and brother-in-law remain on the transplant list, leaving the family enmeshed in guilt and illness.

Such a searing storyline, set against a dramatic Highlands backdrop, might easily have been dreamed up by author Nicholas Evans whose 1995 debut novel, The Horse Whisperer, sold 15 million copies, becoming a number one bestseller in 20 countries.

It has been translated into 40 languages and was made into a film, produced, directed and starring Robert Redford.

The mushroom incident, however, was no epic page-turner but a grimly true story.

Yesterday, as news of Evans's death from a heart attack at the age of 72 was announced, the tragic events of that innocent foraging in woodland on the Altyre Estate in Moray 14 years ago, which left four adults fighting for survival — Evans, his songwriter second wife, Charlotte, who wrote the Sugarbabes 2001 hit Soul Sound, and Charlotte's brother and sister-in-law, Sir Alastair and Lady Louisa Gordon Cumming —were being recalled.

Until the summer of 2008 and that mushroom-hunting expedition, everything about Nicholas Evans's life had seemed garlanded with success.

The film rights from The Horse Whisperer, which also starred Kristin Scott Thomas and a young Scarlett Johansson, had helped provide a 14th-century manor house in Devon.

There were also three other successful books, The Loop, The Smoke Jumper and The Divide.

But everything changed the day he collected a basket of what he thought were tasty ceps. In fact, they were Cortinarius rubellus — also known as the Deadly Webcap — a fungus that contains the toxin orellanin which attacks the liver, kidneys and spinal cord.

It had been ten years since Evans had picked ceps and he didn't spot a crucial difference — that the ones he'd dug up had gills and ceps do not. Poisoning was swift and overwhelming.

'In the beginning not only did I think I might die, but I kind of wanted to because it was so violent, so grim,' he later said.

Three years later, aged 61, Evans received a kidney from his then 29-year-old daughter, Lauren, because his heart was under strain from thrice-weekly dialysis.

'I was told that the average lifespan on dialysis is five to eight years,' he later recalled. 'I had done three and my heart was starting to cause trouble.'

Until then he had been reluctant to be helped by his daughter, a zoologist, even though her blood group was a match to his.

'Your natural instinct is never to do anything to harm your kids, although statistics show there is only a tiny risk to the donor,' he explained.

Lauren finally persuaded him to change his mind, and father and daughter woke up following surgery in adjoining beds at London's Hammersmith Hospital.

'It was marvellous,' Evans said. 'Gratitude is a completely inadequate word. It's like being blessed by an angel.'

At the time of the poisoning Evans had nearly completed his latest bestseller, The Brave, about the corrosive nature of family secrets and guilt.

All the same, it is surely ironic that his own life has, quite by accident, featured an unusual element of storytelling drama.

For the second time in his life, he found himself lying in a hospital bed wondering if he would die before completing a book. In 1994, he had been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma (the deadliest skin cancer) while writing The Horse Whisperer.

Later, after successfully undergoing treatment, he found his own real-life drama taking the novel about a teenage girl and her horse recovering from a horrific road accident, in a different direction.

'I had a new-found empathy,' he said. 'It became much more emotional.'

In the poignant story of redemption and resilience both horse and rider are traumatised by a terrible accident. Then the girl's mother hears of a man said to possess the gift of healing troubled horses. The story unfolds in the majestic setting of rural Montana.

The success of the book — and film — didn't just propel Evans to fame and fortune.

It also made the

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