H Is for Hawk

What the critics say
It just sings. I couldn’t stop reading.
- Mark Haddon

This beautiful book is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration: elegy for a father lost, celebration of a hawk found - and in the finding also a celebration of countryside, forbears of one kind and another, life-in-death. At a time of very distinguished writing about the relationship between human kind and the environment, it is immediately pre-eminent.
- Andrew Motion

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 dazzling piece of work: deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence… The result is a deeply human work shot through…with intelligence and compassion… I will be surprised if a better book that H is for Hawk is published this year.
- Financial Times

I'm convinced it's going to be an absolute classic of nature writing.
- Guardian

[Macdonald’s] descriptive writing, startlingly and devilishly precise…is only the half of it. She has written her taming of Mabel like a thriller, slowly and carefully cranking the tension is that your stomach and heart leap queasily towards each other… Captivates.
- Observer

Captivating… There is a highly polished brilliance to her writing. The English-speaking world has an old passion for books about creatures and captivating companions … Helen Macdonald looks set to revive the genre.
- Mark Cocker

Nature-writing, but not as you know it. Astounding.
- Bookseller

It is a mark of Macdonald’s achievement that so exultant a book can resolve itself in a sense of failure, yet leave the reader as uplifted as a raptor riding on a thermal.
- New Statesman

MacDonald’s prose is poetic, forensic, yet often capable of quickening the pulse. Her lexicon…is vivid and joyous, soaring as freely as birds do.
- New Scientist

One of the most eloquent accounts of bereavement you could hope to read… A grief memoir with wings.
- Bookseller

What she has achieved is a very rare thing in literature - a completely realistic account of a human relationship with animal consciousness… It is a soaring performance and Mabel is the star.
- Sunday Times

Cunningly plaited and – almost – devastating… It deserves to sell shedloads and win prizes, it is naturalist writing of that spectacular quality that is literature too.
- The Times

A wondrous book of loss and recovery… When [Macdonald] matches her factual know-how…with her poet’s eye, it is excellent… An exceptional book of twisted growth.
- National

Absorbing… This memoir is lit with flashes of that grace, a grace that sweeps down to the reader to hold her wrist tight with beautiful, terrible class. The discovery of the season.
- The Economist

Astounding.
- Bookseller

People talk about books that change your life. I loved the fact that this book does something much more valuable. It doesn’t change anything. It leaves everything just where it was, only more so; more distinct, more itself. It opens your eyes. And it deepens what we have always known; that we live side by side with each other, as we do with the creatures around us.
- Caught by the River

A talon-sharp memoir that will thrill and chill you to the bone... Fascinating.
- Mail on Sunday

Mesmerising, decisive and devastating… Her description of Mabel in flight should be etched into every birdwatcher's field guide... Macdonald is a nature writer supreme, arguably the best practitioner of this art form writing today.
- Sunday Express

A soaring triumph.
- Daily Telegraph

Beautiful.
- Sport

Strange yet compelling... Macdonald’s poetic prose soars… An uplifting message that…sends the heart soaring.
- Daily Express

Vivid and fascinating.
- Independent

Soars beyond genres, and burns with emotional and intellectual intensity.
- Nature

We can’t recommend this strange, clever, beautiful book highly enough.
- Eastern Daily Press

A soliloquy that sings from the pages. Truly beautiful.
- Twitter

Heartbreaking.
- Grazia

In fifty years time – a hundred – H is for Hawk will still defy easy definition. Readers will see wildness a little differently and they will still finish with a silent cheer for a fellow human starting to re-engage with the world. File under classic.
- We Love This Book

Poetic, imaginative and richly persuasive prose. Macdonald’s sensitivity to English weather, landscape and natural habitat is extraordinary; she is a word-painter of the subtlest palette and an audio recorder of peerless quality.
- Book Oxygen

Macdonald makes nature writing new.
- For Books Sake

Extraordinary… A searing study of bereavement and a meditation on man’s place in the natural world… Written with vigour, leavened with humour, it doesn’t just sing, it flies.
- Intelligent Life

Unusual and incredibly moving.
- Twin Magazine

A masterpiece.
- Patricia Nicol

Very rarely does a book reach out to its readers in such an immediate and engaging manner… A page-turning saga full of profound reflection… A truly remarkable achievement… This book transcends nature writing. Its quality of distinction is apparent before any exercise of critical faculty.
- WOW247

Macdonald is her father’s daughter; she takes photographs, but with words, brilliant ones. H is for Helen… G is for good.
- BBC Countryfile

Strange and beautiful… An incredible achievement.
- Literary Review

It is in her descriptions of nature that Macdonald really excels… And…it’s the hawks themselves…which really come alive.
- Spectator

Never has the eye of a raptor assumed such fearful, beautiful meaning.
- New Statesman

Big-hearted, joyful and blazing with gorgeous descriptions of nature, H is for Hawk is an unusual but very special memoir.
- Good Housekeeping

Lyrical, headlong, humourous.
- New Statesman

As phenomenal, unusual, moving and agile as a fearsome bird of prey.
- Monocle

Helen’s skill is to cover so much beneath the camouflage of ‘nature writing’ – with perceptive, far-reaching and rather beautiful results.
- Skinny

An elegant, disturbing and heart-warming book.
- Wharfedale Observer

A brilliantly beautiful evocation which interweaves her experiences as an austringer, a grieving daughter, an academic and simply a human being.
- Belfast Telegraph

Destined to be a nature classic.
- Bath Magazine

It is moving and personal in a way that few books of this kind are.
- Cotswold Life

H is for Hawk is a mature, accomplished work: a touchstone for future memoirs, bibliomemoirs, and writing that deals with the natural environment and the self.
- The Times Literary Supplement

Beautifully written and interposed with literary references, it will captivate book lovers and bird lovers alike.
- House and Garden

Likely to leave a lasting impression.
- Scotland Outdoors

This is an encounter with a bird many of us only dream of seeing in the wild, so read this and fill a void.
- Bird Watching

You won’t find a better nature book this year.
- Woman and Home

This part-memoir, part-history, part-nature combination could have gone dreadfully wrong but it doesn’t. In fact, like Mabel, it flies.
- Radio Times

Somehow the book had rattled me so much that, even after finishing it, I couldn’t let it go.
- Guardian

Helen Macdonald’s book is a worthy and unusual winner; it’s part grief-memoir, part history of falconry.
- The TImes

H is for Hawk deserves its acclaim as a classic of its kind.
- Evening Standard

A great read.
- Western Morning News

Macdonald’s unusual approach and her resonant natural descriptions make it an outstanding book.
- Telegraph