01
Cold water, further north · Closest matchAmy Liptrot
British · The Outrun (2016), The Instant (2022)
The Outrun is about returning to Orkney after years in London, taking seasonal work counting corncrakes for the RSPB, swimming in water that is far too cold and rebuilding a life after alcohol addiction. It won the Wainwright Prize and the PEN Ackerley Prize, and Nora Fingscheidt filmed it in 2024 with Saoirse Ronan. The Instant follows a restless period in Berlin and is the less consoling of the two.
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The closest living match, and the two books are constantly recommended together. Same shape: a person in pieces, a specific northern coastline, cold water taken seriously as treatment, a species to count and a recovery the book refuses to tidy up. Liptrot is plainer and more exposed than May, and there is no framework offered at the end — you simply watch a year work. Read The Outrun next.
— Lisanne 02
The same grief, with a hawk in itHelen Macdonald
British · H is for Hawk (2014), Vesper Flights (2020)
H is for Hawk is about training a goshawk after the sudden death of their father, braided with the life of T. H. White, who tried the same thing in the 1930s and made a mess of it; it won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year, and a film with Claire Foy opened in January 2026. Vesper Flights collects forty-one essays on swifts, nests, migraines, mushrooms and the business of watching wildlife at all.
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The book that made this whole shelf commercially possible, and the harder version of what May does. Both use a natural project as the scaffolding for a collapse, and both are honest that the animal or the season is not really the point. Macdonald is more literary, more self-lacerating and less interested in offering the reader a framework to use. If Wintering helped and you want to be unsettled instead, read this.
— LisanneAuthors like Helen Macdonald →
03
The essayist on being aloneOlivia Laing
British · To the River (2011), The Lonely City (2016), The Garden Against Time (2024)
To the River walks the length of the Ouse in Sussex, the river Virginia Woolf drowned in, after the end of a relationship. The Lonely City uses Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz and Henry Darger to think about being alone in New York. The Garden Against Time restores a walled garden in Suffolk and asks who gardens have historically been for. She trained as a herbalist before becoming a critic.
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The most intellectually rigorous writer on this shelf. Laing does what May does — take a personal low point and a physical practice, and think outward from it — but she brings art history, biography and politics in, so the book is never only about her. She is cooler and gives less comfort. Read To the River if the walking and the water are what you want, and The Lonely City if it is the isolation.
— Lisanne 04
Older than the genre · The mountainNan Shepherd
Scottish · The Living Mountain (written 1940s, published 1977)
The Living Mountain is about a hundred pages on the Cairngorms, written during the Second World War and left in a drawer for more than thirty years. Shepherd was not interested in summits; she walked into the plateau rather than up it, and wrote about water, frost, sleep, the body and what happens to perception after days in one place. She lectured in Aberdeen for forty years, published three novels in the 1920s and then almost nothing, and now appears on the Scottish five-pound note.
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The ancestor of everything here, and still the best of it. Shepherd worked out in the 1940s that the point of going out is not achievement but a change in how you perceive — which is the argument of Enchantment, eighty years early and in far fewer words. She has no personal crisis to resolve and asks nothing of the reader. Read it slowly; it takes an afternoon and it will outlast most of your shelf.
— Lisanne 05
The kindest book on the listTove Jansson
Finnish · the Moomin books (from 1945), The Summer Book (1972)
Jansson was a painter and cartoonist writing in Swedish who began the Moomin books during the Second World War. The later ones turn steadily stranger and sadder, particularly Moominland Midwinter, in which Moomintroll wakes from hibernation into a world he does not recognise. The Summer Book, written for adults after her mother's death, is a grandmother and a six-year-old on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, in twenty-two short chapters about almost nothing.
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The seasonal argument of Wintering, made in fiction and without a single instruction. Moominland Midwinter is quite literally about waking in the wrong season and having to learn it, and The Summer Book is about grief handled so lightly that a child could carry it. Jansson never tells you what to do with any of this, which is either the limitation or the whole point.
— Lisanne 06
The argument about attention, made properlyJenny Odell
American · How to Do Nothing (2019), Saving Time (2023)
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is not a self-help book about deleting apps; it is an artist and teacher arguing that attention is a public and political matter, using a rose garden in Oakland, bird-watching, and a long history of people withdrawing from productivity on purpose. Saving Time takes on the clock itself, and where our idea of measurable, sellable time came from. She teaches at Stanford.
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What May gestures at, argued through. Enchantment proposes deliberate attention as a way of living less depleted; Odell asks who benefits from your attention being fragmented in the first place, and refuses to leave it as a personal remedy. She is harder work and considerably more useful if the exhaustion in May's books felt like it had causes outside the reader. Read How to Do Nothing.
— LisanneEvery book by Jenny Odell →
07
Getting lost, on purposeRebecca Solnit
American · Wanderlust (2000), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), A Paradise Built in Hell (2009)
A Field Guide to Getting Lost moves between the colour blue, captivity narratives, a punk scene, her own family and the deliberate practice of not knowing where you are. Wanderlust is a history of walking as politics, pilgrimage and thought. A Paradise Built in Hell argues that people improvise generous communities in disasters while the authorities panic. She has published more than twenty books.
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The writer who established that this kind of book — personal, wandering, held together by association rather than argument — could be first-rate rather than merely soothing. Solnit brings history and politics where May brings folklore and season, and she is far more sceptical of consolation. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is the closest of hers in feel and the best place to start.
— LisanneAuthors like Rebecca Solnit →
08
The American version, with faith in itAnne Lamott
American · Bird by Bird (1994), Traveling Mercies (1999), Somehow (2024)
Bird by Bird is a book about writing that is really about anxiety and perfectionism, and has stayed in print for thirty years on the strength of it. Traveling Mercies is about arriving at Christian faith by an unlikely route, through addiction, single motherhood and a small church in Marin County. Lamott writes short essayistic chapters, is very funny about her own worst instincts, and blurbed Enchantment when it appeared.
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The closest American equivalent, and an admirer. Both write the wobbly, unheroic version of getting through — the small practices, the humour, the refusal to present as fixed — and both are frequently dismissed as comfort reading by people who have not noticed how much is being handled underneath. Lamott has faith where May has season and folklore. Read Traveling Mercies.
— LisanneAuthors like Anne Lamott →
09
The neighbouring bestsellerRaynor Winn
British · The Salt Path (2018), The Wild Silence (2020), Landlines (2022)
The Salt Path describes Winn and her husband losing their home and, in the same week, receiving a diagnosis of a terminal illness for him, and setting out to walk the six-hundred-and-thirty-mile South West Coast Path with almost no money. It sold in the millions and was filmed with Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. In July 2025 The Observer published an investigation disputing significant elements of the account, including how the couple lost their home and aspects of the illness; Winn rejected the central allegations and published a detailed response, and the dispute is unresolved.
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The book most often shelved beside Wintering, and the reason to include it here rather than quietly leave it out. It is the same coastline May walks in The Electricity of Every Living Thing and the same proposition — that walking and weather can hold a life together when nothing else will. Whether you want to read it now is a fair question, and it is one you should get to answer with the facts in front of you.
— Lisanne 10
The argument against herBarbara Ehrenreich
American · Bright-Sided (2009), Natural Causes (2018)
Bright-Sided came out of Ehrenreich's breast cancer diagnosis and the relentlessly upbeat literature that arrived with it, and traces the positive-thinking industry through American Protestantism, corporate motivation and the subprime boom. Natural Causes takes on preventive screening, the wellness business and the belief that a disciplined enough life will hold death off. She held a doctorate in cellular immunology and died in 2022.
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The dissent this shelf needs, from someone with the science to make it. May's books are careful and unsalesy, and they still sit in a market that has monetised rest, wonder and cold water very efficiently, and that tends to convert structural exhaustion into a personal practice. Ehrenreich is the corrective: sometimes you are not underslept, you are underpaid. Read Bright-Sided after Enchantment and see what survives.
— LisanneAuthors like Barbara Ehrenreich →
Frequently asked questions about authors like Katherine May
Who should I read if I love Katherine May?
Amy Liptrot is the closest — northern coastline, cold swimming, a life being put back together. Helen Macdonald is the sharper and stranger version, and Olivia Laing the most rigorous. Nan Shepherd wrote the ancestor of the whole tradition in the 1940s and Tove Jansson the kindest version of the seasonal argument. Jenny Odell and Rebecca Solnit take the argument about attention somewhere political, and Anne Lamott is the warm American equivalent. Raynor Winn is the neighbouring bestseller, with a caveat. Barbara Ehrenreich is the argument against the shelf.
Which Katherine May book should I start with?
Wintering (2020), which is the one people press on each other: the autumn her husband was hospitalised, her son stopped going to school and she left her job, and the winter of sea swimming, bees, folklore and Nordic light that followed. The Electricity of Every Living Thing (2018) is the earlier and more particular book, about walking the South West Coast Path while coming to terms with an autism diagnosis in her late thirties. Enchantment (2023) is the post-pandemic one and works best if you already know her.
Is Katherine May writing a new book?
Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. Enchantment, in 2023, remains her most recent book. She writes The Clearing, a newsletter and community for what she calls wild minds and winterers, and makes a podcast, both of which are where her current work appears. The Electricity of Every Living Thing has been adapted as an audio drama by Audible.
What does wintering mean?
Her term for a fallow period — illness, grief, unemployment, burnout, a bad year — treated as a season rather than a personal failure, with the argument that trees, bees and animals all have strategies for it and we have mostly forgotten ours. In the book it means sleep, cold water, warmth, ritual and lowered expectations, and an active acceptance of sadness rather than a fight against it. It arrived in 2020, which is why a book written before the pandemic became one of its defining texts.
Is Enchantment as good as Wintering?
It is more diffuse and more argued, and readers split on it. Wintering has a crisis and a season holding it together; Enchantment is about recovering a sense of wonder after years of exhaustion, and it moves between stone circles, swimming, bees and church without the same narrative spine. If you loved the structure of the first, you may find the second drifting. If you loved the sensibility, it delivers more of it.
What is The Electricity of Every Living Thing about?
Walking the South West Coast Path, in stages, while recognising herself in a radio programme about autism and going through the process of diagnosis in her late thirties. It is the least consoling and the most specific of her books — a good deal of it is about how exhausting other people are, and how much of ordinary social life she had been managing rather than experiencing. If Wintering felt slightly too smooth, this is the one to read.
What is the criticism of this kind of book?
That it converts a structural problem into a personal practice. The exhaustion May describes is real and widely shared, and cold swimming, candles and rest are pleasant remedies that ask nothing of employers, landlords or health systems — and there is now a very large market selling exactly that. May is more careful than most and does not claim to be curing anything. But it is a fair objection, and the two writers who make it best are Jenny Odell, who politicises attention, and Barbara Ehrenreich, who spent a book on the industry that surrounds this one.
What should I read after Wintering?
Amy Liptrot immediately, then Helen Macdonald if you want to be unsettled rather than soothed, then Nan Shepherd for the source. Jenny Odell if you finished it suspecting the tiredness had causes. And Tove Jansson's Moominland Midwinter if you would like the same argument made in a hundred and fifty pages, in fiction, with no instructions at all.
