H I s for Hawk includes an irritating mix of the personal and confessional: 'Here's a word: Bereavement. White (1906-1964), a complete novice, repeatedly takes the blame for his mistakes he overfed his hawk, petted it constantly and regaled it with Shakespeare and music – which it did rather like. She is no beginner, which is what makes her schoolmarm trashing of TH White's spellbinding yeoman's classic The Goshawk (1951) – a refrain that serves as a narrative structure of sorts – so outrageously unfair. Now in her 40s, she has been obsessed with falconry since she was eight years old, trained her first bird at 11 and has worked at a bird-of-prey centre in England in addition to spending three years training saker falcons in Abu Dhabi for Arab royalty. It sounds desperate, and initially incredibly romantic, even heroic – although it is not quite as extreme in her case as it might sound, because Macdonald is an expert falconer. Such is Macdonald’s grief, which she describes as “a kind of madness”, that she decides her only salvation lies in the training of a goshawk, the most fractious of hawks. It all seems so promising.īut no: this is yet another of those trendy personal memoirs masquerading as nature writing in which the human agonies – in this case the sudden death of a much-loved father – relegates the natural world to an arch subtext at best.

A dramatic young goshawk glares out from the eye-catching jacket of Helen Macdonald’s infuriating account of manning, or acclimatising to humans, a bird of prey. Yet the foolish, such as me, are often taken in, if rarely quite as fully as with this theatrical exercise in genre-bending soul searching. H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from one of our most unique and transcendent voices.Wise people give good advice about never being fooled by the cover of a book. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human discover the pain and beauty of being alive ( People).

The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20) ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. One of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year

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