Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
£9.20£10.40 (-12%)
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
‘A beautiful, gentle exploration of the dark season of life and the light of spring that eventually follows’ RAYNOR WINN
‘My favourite book of the last five years’ CAITLIN MORAN
Wintering is a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life, times when we must retreat to care for and repair ourselves. Katherine May thoughtfully shows us how to come through these times with the wisdom of knowing that, like the seasons, our winters and summers are the ebb and flow of life.
‘Every bit as beautiful and healing as the season itself’ ELIZABETH GILBERT
‘Absolutely beautiful’ CHERYL STRAYED
Read more
Additional information
| Publisher | Rider, 1st edition (12 Nov. 2020) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 288 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1846045991 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1846045998 |
| Dimensions | 12.7 x 1.7 x 19.7 cm |
by melissa
Relatable, comforting. Beautiful descriptions. Wanted the book to go on. Would read again which says a lot as I am not an avid reader.
by Amazon Customer
Lots of insight and ideas on how to cope with the winter months
by Meloney Murphy
I bought this book for my sister as a gift, & she liked the book very much.
by Sue
This is a book about the author and her search for her “Wintering”. I found this book so interesting to read and could relate to in so many ways, as I am so sure many others could. Her husband became ill, so did she and she soon realised that she spent all of her time rushing around, being stressed and pleasing everyone else but not actually looking after herself. She soon realised that she herself needed to go through a period of “Wintering”. That she needed to listen to what her body was screaming out to her and to slow down. When she says in the book the dread and sick feeling she had when she received a text or email from work – I think a lot of us have had this at some point. Katherine researches what Wintering means and does – and how different animals and culture go through this. I found this to be a fascinating and inspirational read. She goes onto explain how she developed a love for Sea swimming whatever the weather and how she changed her life. Katherine also talks about her son, his anxiety and how she helped him and herself to work through it. I feel that right now is the perfect time to read this book. #KatherineMay #wintering #reading #bookreview #review #hygee #findingyourself #autism #anxiety #hibernation #cold #bluelagoon #book #bookstagram
by Adrian Bailey
This is a wise book, beautifully painful. It is a necessary riposte to the tragic delusion that life is supposed to be wonderful all of the time. It is also a celebration of life. The book, the writer says, is not about beauty but about reality. That reality must include our winterings or deep depressions. Wintering is related to Sylvia Plath’s usage in Ariel. Winter and Summer are cyclic, and so are human lives.
A friend of the author who has bipolar turned to cold, literal cold, as a coping strategy. We must face the cold. We must face our shame, guilt, worthlessness, and all the other elements of miserable rumination. (And save us from the perfumed platitudes of plastic demands to be happy! “This is where we are now: endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity, while erasing the dirty underside of real life. I always read brutality in those messages: they offer next to nothing.”)
I don’t feel able in a brief review to greatly value this book. It is both delicate and earth-heavy. It’s no ‘Rings of Saturn’ but does have a way of incorporating nature, history, myth, poetry, a sprinkling of humour (unlike Sebald!). Unless you would specifically benefit from some fascinating facts about bees or the hibernation habits of dormice, the book gives the reader nothing to ‘use’. It’s not a self-help book, though it is one of the most helpful books about depression I have ever read. As May writes, “Usefulness, in itself, is a useless concept when it comes to humans.” In the life between the delicacy of language and the cold earth is a big thing, call it a big idea because language even at its most delicate is often empty. But this ‘big idea’ is not propositional, it’s something that emerges in shadow and shifting glimpses, of which May writes, “Some ideas are too big to take in once and completely.” Her book, she says, did not go as planned (which was, perhaps based on her academic mindset) to be based on research into the world’s traditions and stories of winter) because life, experience got in the way. The book is a representation of May’s experience of experiencing life as it unfolded, as she took on the very hard and lonely confrontation with reality (hers, yours and mine). While the writing has a sort of domestic level, daily matters, this enhances the whole since it is the mundane that is realistically of this world, and our soil of knowing anything at all. But to me, the book is not only full of sparkling sentences and frost-sharp insights, it is a literary work that will survive the annual Spring book culling, a work to savour and return to. It is written for all of us. You don’t need to be some high brow academic.
May writes of Plath’s Ariel, “Its sentences meander across lines and stanzas; its meanings blur. In it, I find a kind of disorder, as though we are dropped into the middle of a thought process whose beginning and end we can’t perceive.” There’s something of this in ‘Wintering’ as in any excellent piece of writing. The final section both appealed to me personally, and through light on something I’d never articulated. It’s about losing voice. This was literal in May’s case but I take it as figuratively how some of us are never settled with one voice, using our council estate voice here, our teacherly voice there: our voice is not simply referenced upon our various social roles and their confusions, but is deeper in the identity of who we are and how we perceive. I think this book can be seen as an author in search of a voice, and I think she found it because it sings beautifully.
One of myriad aspects of our winterings is that in our worst moments even our best (such as having created a wonderful book like this) may seem worthless. But that is part of our stories as we ceaselessly negotiate reality, rather than the futile task of trying to make reality conform to us. “That’s what humans do: we make and remake our stories, abandoning the ones that no longer fit and trying on
new ones for size.” May can move fluently between such homely language and discussing John Donne. Sometimes life sucks, she writes. The domestic, the ordinary details of everyday life are not in some lesser universe than the contemplative, neither should such dualism arise. What is certain such as dogma or cat vomit is no more or less important than wavering metaphysical ponderings but neither should be taken as a final state of being. Whether we like it or not we find a voice, a perspective, between the poles of concepts. We are “infinitely ,,,,complex, full of choices and mistakes, periods of glory and seasons of utter despair…. All of it matters. All of it weaves the wider fabric that binds us.” This quotation refers to our being human together.
And having mentioned weaving and fabrics, May refers (at the ‘mere’ level of her life in reality) to research that suggests strongly that knitting should be prescribed by doctors!
by Mummyofmytribe
I was hoping to get some advice for dealing with difficult times in life and our actual winter months.
What this book actually is , is a diary of how a wealthy and well educated middle class white woman deals with difficult times in her life during the winter months.
I got bored reading about her husbands burst appendix and her own hypochondria.
She whinges and complains a lot but is actually alot more blessed than most of us- she can simply afford to quit her job and home educate her child, she paid for fertility testing and then she turned up toher first ivf appointment actually pregnant naturally before treatment, she travels to Iceland , Finland etc , she has a nice house by the beach ,visits saunas , she can actually rest when unwell etc
I liked the one or two paragraphs where she discusses preparing for winter with her Finnish friend and also the paragraphs about wolves but other than that I found this book to be a disappointment.
This lady needs to count her blessing and stop whinging and complaining.
by Claudia
Having been through my own deep winter: illness and problems for my son, I could relate very much to how she recovers herself and winters difficult times. A real solace.
by Kathiea
A friend said this book had helped her so I read it out of curiosity. It really reminded me of the necessity of each of the seasons. It helped me remember our lives have their own seasons too including Winter.