Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Katherine May
Katherine May writes about the parts of life we’re taught to push through rather than sit with — grief, burnout, a late autism diagnosis, the low, dark months that don’t respond to positive thinking. She gave the modern retreat-into-difficulty a name, “wintering,” and it stuck precisely because she refuses to turn it into a productivity hack. Her books are quiet, specific, and largely uninterested in silver linings.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Memoir · Nature · Updated August 2026 · ~7 min read
Quick answer
Katherine May has written five books: two novels early in her career, a memoir of her autism diagnosis (The Electricity of Every Living Thing, 2018), the bestseller that made her name (Wintering, 2020), and Enchantment (2023), on rebuilding a sense of wonder. Start with Wintering if you’ve never read her.
Key facts
- Base: Whitstable, England, on the coast of Kent
- Books written: 5, published 2013–2023
- Diagnosis: Diagnosed with autism in her late thirties, the subject of The Electricity of Every Living Thing
- Best-known book: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (2020)
- Other work: Hosts the podcast “The Wintering Sessions”
Why trust this list: Every book below is one I’ve read in full. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
The Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club
May’s debut novel, set in the coastal town she still calls home, about a woman rebuilding her life after loss and finding an unlikely community among a group of open-water swimmers. It shares the same coastline and the same interest in cold-water resilience that later becomes literal in Wintering.
Useful mostly as an early sketch of themes she’d return to non-fictionally — the sea, community, recovery after rupture. Not essential, but interesting once you know her later work.
The Electricity of Every Living Thing: One Woman’s Walk with Asperger’s
A memoir structured around a 630-mile solo walk along the South West Coast Path, during which May comes to understand — and eventually receives a formal diagnosis for — the autism she’d spent her life masking without a name for it. It’s as much about the walk as the diagnosis, using the physical difficulty of the trail as a frame for the harder internal reckoning.
The book that established her method: pairing a physical, external undertaking with an unresolved internal question, and letting the two run alongside each other rather than forcing tidy conclusions.
The Best, Most Awful Job: Twenty Writers Talk Honestly About Motherhood
An anthology May edited rather than authored solo, gathering twenty writers on the contradictions of motherhood — love and exhaustion, identity and erasure, held without resolving into either a celebration or a complaint.
Not a Katherine May book in the usual sense, but her editorial fingerprints are clear: the same refusal to sand down a hard feeling into something more palatable.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Written before the pandemic but published into it, Wintering argues for the necessity of retreat during hard seasons of life — illness, loss, burnout — rather than pushing through them on schedule. May draws on nature’s actual winter, hibernation, and dormancy as evidence that fallow periods aren’t failure but a different, necessary mode of living.
A #1 New York Times bestseller and BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and the book that gave a whole generation of readers a word for what they were going through. Start here.
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
A follow-up written in the aftermath of pandemic-era isolation, in which May looks for ways back into wonder through deliberate attention to earth, water, fire, and air. It’s less about retreat than Wintering and more about re-entry — how to rejoin a demanding world without losing the slower attention you built during the retreat.
The natural sequel to Wintering: if that book is about the necessity of withdrawal, this one is about what comes after, and how not to let the noise swallow whatever you found in the quiet.
Frequently asked questions
From the bookshelf
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If memoir that sits with hard seasons without rushing past them is your thing, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author pages, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
