A few weeks ago, The Financial Times published a sobering essay on an urgent subject: loneliness in the time of COVID-19. Written by the paper’s Chicago correspondent, Claire Bushey, it described what it has felt like to live by yourself in this miserable year.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, by Katherine May241 pagesRIVERHEAD BOOKS

“Lonely as a cloud?” she wrote. “I am as lonely as an iceberg, an egg, a half carafe of wine. I am lonely as the body is hungry three times a day, hollowed again and again by an ache that does not ease except with the sustenance of connection.”