Winner of the Costa Book of the Year
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction
'I can't remember the last time a book made me feel so many different things in such quick succession.'- Rachel Cooke,The Guardian
As a child,Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer,learning the arcane terminology and reading all the classic books. Years later,when her father died and she was struck deeply by grief,she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk.
She bought Mabel for ￡800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge,ready to embark on the long,strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
H is for Hawk is an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming.
This is a book about memory,nature and nation,and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love.
Publisher: Vintage PublishingISBN: 9780099575450Number of pages: 320Weight: 258 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 20 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'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 than H is for Hawk is published this year.'- Melissa Harrison,Financial Times
'I'm convinced it's going to be an absolute classic of nature writing.'- Nick Barley,The Guardian
'I can't remember the last time a book made me feel so many different things in such quick succession.'- Rachel Cooke,The 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.'- Rachel Cooke,The 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.'- The Guardian,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.'- Philip Hoare,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.'- Benjamin Myers,New Scientist
'One of the most eloquent accounts of bereavement you could hope to read... A grief memoir with wings.'- Caroline Sanderson,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.'- John Carey,The 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.'- Angus Clarke,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.'- Tim Dee,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.'- Erica Wagner,The Economist
'Astounding.'- Bookseller
'A talon-sharp memoir that will thrill and chill you to the bone... Fascinating.'- Craig Brown,The 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.'- Stuart Winter,The Sunday Express
'A soaring triumph.'- Christian House,The Daily Telegraph
'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
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