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Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.
In Wintering, Katherine May recounts her own year-long journey through winter, sparked by a sudden illness in her family that plunged her into a time of uncertainty and seclusion. When life felt at is most frozen, she managed to find strength and inspiration from the incredible wintering experiences of others as well as from the remarkable transformations that nature makes to survive the cold.
This beautiful, perspective-shifting memoir teaches us to draw from the healing powers of the natural world and to embrace the winters of our own lives.
Katherine May is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent works include The Electricity of Every Living Thing and The Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club. She lives by the sea in Whitstable and enjoys sea swimming and long walks. She lives and breathes everything the natural world has to offer and is compelled by how the wild and extreme landscapes can benefit our mental and emotional wellbeing.
"Katherine May thoughtfully examines the emotional, spiritual, and geographical reality of the cold times, the dark days, and those periods of our lives when things are neither soft nor easy. In so doing, she offers a great and humane service to her readers: she shows us that wintering cannot be avoided, but need not be feared."
– Elizabeth Gilbert
"Wise, radical and comforting. It's a refreshing, original way of looking at winter, both the season and the winterings that happen in all of our lives. A thought-provoking joy to read."
– Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden
"An elegant investigation into the consolations of nature and how it can be wonderfully restorative even on the bleakest of days"
– Sunday Express
"We all experience periods of 'wintering' in our lives and this book shows us how to embrace the uncertainty that can come with it. A beautiful book that can be enjoyed in both winter and summer."
– Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking
"A peaceful rebuff to life in fast-forward"
– Observer
"[A] sympathetic memoir [...] May recounts how she attempted to embrace rather than resist the gloom and chill of winter [...] she radiates sincerity and quiet self-knowledge"
– TLS
"An empowering and touching read that will inspire a survivalist spirit on even the darkest days of winter."
– Town and Country Magazine
