The Butterfly Season cover art

The Butterfly Season

On Beginnings, Endings, and the Life in Between
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The Butterfly Season

By: Lea Korsgaard, Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg - translator
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

In the darkness of winter on the first day of the year, a woman in Denmark is making a list. She plans to set out and see all of the country's butterfly species in a single year. She knows nothing about butterflies. She doesn’t even know why she wants to see them. She just knows that something is calling her. The pull is irresistible.

The Butterfly Season tells the story of what happened next. We follow Lea Korsgaard as her list takes her to landscapes she never knew existed, shaped by the wind and by the sea. She walks on ancient seabeds and hills made of algae shells. She is led to secret places by strangers who offer their help along the way. And she is led into the past; into the lives of her ancestors, and into the world of books, philosophy and mythology. Because ever since humans started thinking about the meaning of life and death, the butterfly has symbolized our hope of rebirth—and confronted us with the biggest questions of existence: Why do we live? And what are we living for?

© Lea Korsgaard 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Animals Biological Sciences Customs & Traditions Ecosystems & Habitats Europe Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Philosophy Science Social Sciences

Critic reviews

Lea Korsgaard has written an important and wonderful book about the hunt for Denmark’s 64 different butterflies … Read these 314 pages and your view of the world will never be the same
One of those books that makes the world richer (Kristeligt Dagblad)
Detailed, sensory, precise ... Korsgaard has a childlike enthusiasm, and it is contagious. When she describes her hunt for butterflies, it’s almost like reading a crime novel (it’s strangely exciting to see if she finds them!). But it’s also like reading a love story (it’s strangely moving when she does!)
Lea Korsgaard’s tantalizing butterfly annals turn disciplined insect hunting into a meditation on existence … The Butterfly Season is continuously illustrated with the author’s own fine butterfly drawings, is an excellent and extremely well-composed book, first-class literary journalism
With her book about butterflies, Lea Korsgaard re-enchants the world. It’s a book about chasing butterflies, but it’s just as much a book about the meaning of life – and a wonderful defence of an endangered natural world
You don’t have to share her view of nature and the world in detail to be hooked. Her good writing is the kind that happens when the beautifully nerdy unfolds. It’s about passion, which in a way is its own purpose, but which always, when managed with, well, passion, becomes so much more. Lea Korsgaard’s account of her inner and outer journeys becomes one of those books that makes the world a little bigger. Even when it’s about the smallest of things
The book manages to combine nature writing, personal development, and existential reflection in a way that speaks to both the head and the heart. It invites the reader to see the world—and the butterflies in it—with renewed awareness and wonder
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