After her father's sudden death, a grieving historian trains a fierce goshawk and slowly finds her way back
Grief, a hawk and healing
When Helen Macdonald's father, a photojournalist, died suddenly, she was overwhelmed by grief. A lifelong lover of falconry, she decided to buy and train a goshawk, one of the most difficult birds of prey to tame. She named the hawk Mabel and withdrew from the world into the intense work of training her, while discovering a strange connection with the writer T. H. White.
Who will enjoy it
Readers of memoir and nature writing, anyone coping with loss, and those who love birds and the English countryside.
What you will get
A beautiful, raw and honest memoir about grief, wildness and healing, with breathtaking writing about a hawk and the English landscape.
H Is for Hawk Facts: Pages, Genre and Setting
Genre
Nonfiction · Memoir · Grief · Nature
Length
320 pages · ≈ 9 h
More about this book
Macdonald was a research fellow at Cambridge when the news of her father's death came. Since childhood she had read about falconry and flown birds of prey, and in her sorrow she longed for something wild. She traveled to Scotland to collect a young goshawk, a powerful, nervous bird with a fearsome reputation, and began the long process of manning her: gaining her trust, getting her used to people and eventually flying her free over the fields around Cambridge.
As she trains Mabel, Macdonald also retells the story of T. H. White, the author of The Once and Future King, whose book The Goshawk described his own failed attempt to train a hawk in the nineteen thirties. White's loneliness and inner conflicts mirror her own state, and his story becomes a warning about losing oneself in the wild. Macdonald writes vividly about the hawk's moods, the thrill of hunting and the landscapes they move through, and honestly about depression and isolation. Slowly, through the bird and the people who support her, she returns to the human world.
Intense and lyrical, a modern classic of nature writing. About 320 pages in the Grove paperback.
Wild
The Year of Magical Thinking
When Breath Becomes Air
The Noonday Demon
Educated
On Death and Dying
Angela’s Ashes
A Grief Observed
An Unquiet Mind
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
A Three Dog Life