Destined to be a classic of nature writing, the story of how one woman trained a goshawk.
As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T. H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.
When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey-an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for The Once and Future King. It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.
As John Vaillant's The Tiger depicted the dangerous collision of people and nature, H is for Hawk evokes our deepest longings for something wild. With stunning language that that resonates long after the book's conclusion, H is for Hawk is destined to be a classic of nature writing.
#1 Globe and Mail Bestseller
"It just sings. I couldn't stop reading."
-Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
"A moving memoir of grief."
-The Guardian
"A memoir of one woman and her bird of prey, a mighty goshawk-but so much more. . . A strange, obsessive, highly literary and utterly original work."
-Daily Mail
"This is a book made from the heart that goes to the heart. It combines old and new nature and human nature with great originality. No one who has looked up to see a bird of prey cross the sky could read it and not have their life shifted."
-Tim Dee
"H is for Hawk is a work of great spirit and wonder, illuminated equally by terror and desire. Each beautiful sentence is capable of taking a reader's breath. The book is built of feather and bone, intelligence and blood, and a vulnerability so profound as to conjure that vulnerability's shadow, which is the great power of honesty. It is not just a definitive work on falconry; it is a definitive work on humanity, and all that can and cannot be possessed."
-Rick Bass
"A lovely touching book about a young woman grieving over the death of her father becoming rejuvenated by training one of the roughest, most difficult creatures in the heavens, the goshawk."
-Jim Harrison Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian and affiliate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Falcon (2006) and Shaler's Fish (2001).
