H Is for Hawk

Reviews

“It sings. I couldn’t stop reading.”

“Captivating and beautifully written, it’s a meditation on the bond between beasts and humans and the pain and beauty of being alive.”

“One of the loveliest things you’ll read this year.”

“Macdonald’s first sight of her bird…is one of the most memorable passages I’ve read this year or, for that matter, this decade. The heat of the moment is enough to melt grammar.”

“Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book…is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.”

“Helen Macdonald has written a spectacular memoir…She is also a marvelous narrator, evoking the open spaces of her Cambridge fields, the natural violence of a goshawk’s existence, and her crippling fear of mingling with society when she is so bereft. It is all there in her voice, along with a crisp English accent that is such a pleasure to listen to…She slightly lowers her voice to distinguish White’s story from her own journey out of sorrowful madness into a hopeful future. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

“A well-wrought book, one part memoir, one part gorgeous evocation of the natural world, and one part literary meditation…The discovery of the season.”

“A talon-sharp memoir that will thrill and chill you to the bone…Macdonald has just the right blend of the scientist and the poet, of observing on the one hand and feeling on the other.”

“What [Macdonald] 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.”

“A dazzling piece of work: deeply affecting, utterly fascinating, and blazing with love and intelligence…a deeply human work shot through, like cloth of gold, with intelligence and compassion.”

“Extends the boundaries of nature writing. As a naturalist she has somehow acquired her bird’s laser-like visual acuity. As a writer she combines a lexicographer’s pleasure in words as carefully curated objects with an inventive passion for new words or for ways of releasing fresh effects from the old stock.”

“In this profoundly inquiring and wholly enrapturing memoir, Macdonald exquisitely and unforgettably entwines misery and astonishment, elegy and natural history, human and hawk.”

“Poignant, thoughtful, and moving—and likely to become a classic.”

“Unexpectedly, Macdonald is an extraordinary, nuanced narrator, whose elegant voice makes her eloquent prose even more affective.”

“Macdonald reads her own work in an emotionally resonant voice slightly reminiscent of Emma Thompson’s. For readers who have difficulty tracking Macdonald through her multipronged memoir, her narration might be just the ticket.”

“[An] elegant synthesis of memoir and literary sleuthing.”

“A deep, dark work of terrible beauty that will open fissures in the stoniest heart…Macdonald is a survivor…she has produced one of the most eloquent accounts of bereavement you could hope to read…A grief memoir with wings.”

“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 preeminent.”

“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.”

“A lovely touching book about a young woman grieving over the death of her father becoming rejuvenated by training one of the roughest, most difficult creatures in the heavens, the goshawk.”

“The most magical book I have ever read.”

“A work of great spirit and wonder, illuminated equally by terror and desire. Each beautiful sentence is capable of taking a reader’s breath. The book is built of feather and bone, intelligence and blood, and a vulnerability so profound as to conjure that vulnerability’s shadow, which is the great power of honesty. It is not just a definitive work on falconry; it is a definitive work on humanity and all that can and cannot be possessed.”

“One of the year’s most acclaimed books, Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk brings together a meditation on grief with observations on the natural world around us.”

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