How Wintering captured the strange beauty of 2020 Features How Wintering captured the strange beauty of 2020
Katherine May’s book about retreating from everyday life was released a month before lockdown, yet has become an emblem of it for readers around the world. Here Alice Vincent explores how Wintering gave us all something to cling onto.
It’s uncanny to read
Wintering, Katherine May’s fourth book, at the end of the year we’ve just had. I found myself underlining several passages throughout the first dozen pages out of the sheer familiarity of what May writes. On page one: The photographs I have of that day seem absurd now that I know what was about to happen . She is writing about the party that pre-empts her husband’s burst appendix, but it could have been snapshots from a wedding in early March, of two people hugging in a selfie, taken as Covid cases ratcheted up in late winter.