H is for Hawk

*Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize
*Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Biography Award 入圍 2014英國科斯塔圖書獎
*Shortlisted for the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize
*Longlisted 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.

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