Helen Macdonald

An award-winning best-seller from the UK recounts how the author, an experienced falconer grieving the sudden death of her father, endeavored to train for the first time a dangerous goshawk predator as part of her personal recovery.

H is for Hawk

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.

Gelaine Trinidad

Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize Winner of the 2014 Costa Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize 'In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier, and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they're the birdwatchers' dark grail.' 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. 'To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so gain the ability to predict what it will do next. Eventually you don't see the hawk's body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. The hawk's apprehension becomes your own. As the days passed and I put myself in the hawk's wild mind to tame her, my humanity was burning away.' Destined to be a classic of nature writing, 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.

Sarah Sammis

In 1951 T.H. White wrote a book a book about goshawks, called, of course, The Goshawk. The book, while not a popular one from the author best known for The Once and Future King (1938), made a huge impression on MacDonald. H is for Hawk settles into being a very boring and very wordy book report on White's book.

It took me three days to get to page 34. So here I am admitting defeat.

désirée

pretty tough to get through. very technical writing with brief pretty moments.

Janice Hopper

After this book, I'm swearing off stories of women recovering from the death of a parent for a while.

There was a lot of beauty in this book, and a lot of sadness in the author. Also a lot of T.H. White, which I didn't expect. I actually learned more about T.H. White in this book than I really wanted to know. :/ 

Anyway, the author works through her grief over the sudden death of her father by training a goshawk. She gets a little lost for a while, but then she gets better. And the hawk both hurts and helps. 

The parts with the hawk are pretty fascinating. I found her depictions of her grief and the total overthrow of her life at the death of her father (and some other changes that happened about the same time) pretty intense, and kind of uncomfortable reading. I had to listen to this in bits and pieces, because I'd start to feel overwhelmed from time to time. So. Much. FEELING. going on. 

But the writing's beautiful.

Pavonini

Nature, grief, a bit of literary history - this book had loads of elements I loved, and was very readable. The emotions were immediate and rang true. The will to become wild is for me part of grief and of depression. Some of the descriptions were concisely beautiful. I would have devoured it in one day if I didn't have things interrupting me. It completely transported me.

Clara Moore

A powerful and intriguing tale of a woman finding herself and her passions through falconry. Reading this book was like watching the world from a hawk's point of view told through the words of the woman who knows the bird best. It is truly unique and will make you want to go scan the skies with fresh eyes.

Discover the number one bestselling phenomenon that is a powerful and profound mediation on grief expressed through the trials of training a goshawk. As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer, learning the arcane terminology and reading all the classic books. Years later, when her father died and she was struck deeply by grief, she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She bought Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. H is for Hawk is an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. This is a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love. ‘This beautiful book is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration’ Andrew Motion ‘It just sings. I couldn’t stop reading’ Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time ‘Dazzling... Deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence’ Financial Times

Bee 

Milo Jean

I found Helen’s writing style to be beautiful and loved hearing about the journey of grieving she went on while raising this Hawk. I found the described moments of grief to be deeply relatable for me and moving. And even cried at the very beginning of this book. 

What really knocked down the enjoyment of this book for me was all the parts about White. Honestly I found all that talk about his books and how badly he raised his Hawk to be pretty boring and weird. Especially all that talk about his tortured life and repressed sexual feelings. I’m not really sure what that had to do with the authors personal story of grief or of raising a goshawk. I had to fight myself to keep from skipping his parts every time they came up.

Hannah Derzanovich

It was okay. All of the hawk-adjacent stuff was interesting, the rest was a little tedious.

Melody Izard

I thought I was reading fiction. I thought I was reading beautiful fiction drenched with the authors heart and soul. I kept saying, "she has put her life in this fiction and it's not too cleverly disguised". Then I looked at a review of the book and saw that I was the silly one. A memoir. So much of the author is on these pages. If she held back, I don't know what it could possibly be. And do I want to hold a wild hawk and see it rip a small mammal to shreds? Yes. I want to consume the whole world of raptors. My friend and I bought each other a copy of The Goshawk to give the other for Christmas. There is some of my soul too.

The Birds and the Bees series was designed for Vintage Classics by Timorous Beasties, the Scottish studio famous for their designs inspired by the natural world. As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. Years later, when her father died, she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She bought Mabel for �800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. Her story is an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. WINNER OF THE 2014 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

H Is for Hawk

hat carter

Samantha Plakun

Andrew Reeves

One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year 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. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20) 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. 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). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from one of our most unique and transcendent voices.