H is for Hawk: The Sunday Times bestseller and Costa and Samuel Johnson Prize Winner

Description

**WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR** **WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION** **WINNER OF THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE TRANGER** 'Dazzling... Deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence' Financial Times Discover the number one bestselling phenomenon that is a powerful and profound mediation on grief expressed through the trials of training a goshawk. **SELECTED BY CARIAD LLOYD ON BBC TWO'S BETWEEN THE COVERS** 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 e800 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. 'This beautiful book is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration' Andrew Motion 'It just sings. I couldn't stop reading' Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time 'Dazzling... Deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence' Financial Times

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, naturalist and historian of science. Her book H is for Hawk won many prizes, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Costa Book of the Year, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France, and in the US was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and lives in Suffolk.

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 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 * Guardian * I can't remember the last time a book made me feel so many different things in such quick succession. -- Rachel Cooke * 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 * 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. -- 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 * 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 * 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. -- Laura Beatty * Caught by the River * A talon-sharp memoir that will thrill and chill you to the bone... Fascinating. -- Craig Brown * 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 * Sunday Express * A soaring triumph. -- Christian House * Daily Telegraph *