Helen Macdonald

*A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER* *A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK* Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches. Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century's greatest nature writers. **CHOSEN AS A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK TO WATCH OUT FOR IN 2020 AND A NEW STATESMAN BOOK TO READ IN 2020**

Vesper Flights

Helen MacDonald

From the New York Times bestselling author of H is for Hawk and winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction, comes a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world

sarah

When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.

We use animals as ideas to amplify and enlarge aspects of ourselves, turning them into simple, safe harbours for things we feel and cannot express. None of us see animals clearly. They’re too full of the stories we’ve given them…The more I've learned about animals the more I've come to think there might not be only one right way to express care, to feel allegiance, a love for place, a way of moving through the world.

reminds me of my sweet central park pigeon… 

Such encounters with pigeons as ephemerally dissolving people’s solitude…And that is why many of us feed animals – not merely because it's satisfying to feel we have helped them, but because it surrounds us with creatures that know us, are able to forge bonds with us, have come to regard us as part of their world. 

Increasingly knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief. 

A few miles beneath me was molten rock, a few miles above limitless dust and vacancy, and there I'd lie with the warm blanket of the troposphere over me and red cotton duvet cover too, and the smell of tonight's dinner lingering upstairs, and downstairs the sound of my mother busy at her typewriter… No matter how tightly the day’s bad things had gripped me, there was so much up there above me, so much below.

And while my feet are treading on last year’s leaves, those of next spring are already furled in buds on the tips of twigs around and above me.

So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it... But this was nothing like that at all. It was a child's way of looking at nature: one seeking intimacy and companionship. When I learned the names of these creatures from field guides it was because I needed to know them the same way I had to know the names of my classmates at school. Their diverse lives expanded what I considered as home way beyond the walls of my house. They made the natural world seem a place of complex and beautiful safety. They felt like family.

Jeremy Wang

there are deep and fundamental observations about humans scattered throughout this essay collection, but it takes some effort to excavate them. for a collection united (generally) by a motif of birds, it is oddly heavy at times; making it all the way through involves plodding through swathes of dense descriptive text that doesn’t necessarily have much interesting to say. 

i will say that there are beautiful moments which make the read worthwhile overall. 

of a newborn swift: “The bird was a strange coincidence of solidity and air.”

after meeting a wild boar for the first time: “For all my interest in this creature, the boar had become bored with me and simply walked away.”

at times, mcdonald is a genuinely surprising thinker. to insert a semi-interview with a refugee student in the middle of these essays was a brilliant idea, and her ability to connect birds, nature, and bizarrely specific historical anecdotes (huh? stanley spencer?) is genuinely delightful. 

and speaking of historical anecdotes, i’m amazed at her vast knowledge of natural history and the evolution of our perceptions of animals. i come away from this book knowing much more about the world!

Cindy Lieberman

4.5 rounding up because some of these stories will stay with me for a long, long tine. In this collection of very personal and often poignant essays, the author reveals that she has been enchanted by animals her entire life and allows us to better understand how her naturalist mind works. Some standout pieces include the cuckoo and the spy, DMVs (deer-motor vehicle collisions), bats, swifts...the list goes on. I received a copy of this book from the publisher several months ago and finally got around to reading it. I’m glad I did. And I’m glad I have the hardcover, as I know I will be returning to some of the stories again.

From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk, a brilliant and insightful work about our relationship to the natural world Our world is a fascinating place, teeming not only with natural wonders that defy description, but complex interactions that create layers of meaning. Helen Macdonald is gifted with a special lens that seems to peer right through it all, and she shares her insights--at times startling, nostalgic, weighty, or simply entertaining--in this masterful collection of essays. From reflections on science fiction to the true story of an Iranian refugee's flight to the UK, Macdonald has a truly omnivorous taste when it comes to observations of both the banal and sublime. Peppered throughout are reminisces of her own life, from her strange childhood in an estate owned by the Theosophical Society to watching total eclipses of the sun, visits to Uzbek solar power plants, eccentric English country shows, and desert hunting camps in the Gulf States. These essays move from personal experiences into wider meditations about love and loss and how we build the world around us. Whether more journalistic in tone, or literary--even formally experimental--each piece is generous, lyrical, and speaks to one another. Macdonald creates a strong thematic undertow that quietly takes the reader along piece to piece and sets them down, finally, at a place they've never been before.

Vesper Flights

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