If therapy is a talking cure, this beautiful book is a reading cure. Not that it sets out in a know-it-all way to enlighten. It is too internalised for that. It is a personal, original and wayward examination of the idea that, as humans, we have – and need to have – our fallow seasons, that we must learn to revel in days when the light is low.

In this honest and deeply sympathetic meditation on her own fall through a gap in the 'mesh of the everyday world,' Ms. May, a British novelist and essayist, proves that there is grace in letting go, stepping back and giving yourself time to repair in the dark.

May writes beautifully of her own recent bout with a personal winter.

... [a] lovely, melancholy memoir.

... alternates travel and research, and mind and body – and ranges widely.

The book itself is an exercise of mindfulness, an immersion not in the linearity of a plot but in the practice of thinking, meandering through each month’s themes—slumber, hot water, cold water, light—to ponder what it means to be alive and how to make a life. As we go, we are breathlessly held in an in-between state, a limbo, a transition. We are always on the cusp: as we reach the end, it does not feel like an end at all, but rather a resurfacing into consciousness.

In her restrained yet exuberant memoir, Wintering, British writer Katherine May counters Smith as surely as one solstice tilts against the other, evoking an atavistic grace tied to home and hearth, a season of inventory. For May, hunkering down is just another way to roll up her sleeves and get to work.

In this introspective, beautifully written mix of memoir and philosophy, May explores life’s hardest season and the lessons of acceptance. With a pandemic keeping us isolated in so many ways, May offers much-needed solace and comfort and a reminder that seasons eventually turn..

... an intimate meditation on solitude and transformation.