Training a hawk through grief

Helen Macdonald's father died without warning of a heart attack on a London street in 2007. In the months that followed, Macdonald — a poet, historian, and falconer — did something that surprised even her. She bought a young goshawk and began the long, difficult process of training it to fly free and return.

H Is for Hawk, published in 2014 and winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year, is three things at once: a close account of falconry's ancient craft, an exploration of T. H. White's troubled attempts to train a goshawk in the 1930s, and a memoir of grief. The three strands braid together in ways that feel inevitable by the end.

Macdonald writes about Mabel, the goshawk, with extraordinary precision — her yellow eyes, her terrifying speed, the way she stands above a kill with wings spread in a gesture called mantling. But she also writes honestly about what training a wild predator does to a grieving person: it offers a form of absorption that nothing else can quite match.

There is a thread in the book about how deeply some people need to find wildness — not as spectacle but as something they can be in proximity to, something that does not require them to perform being human. Macdonald writes about losing herself in Mabel's world and having to find the way back.

The book changed how many readers understand both grief and the natural world. It is not a comfortable or consoling memoir, but it is an honest one, and the prose is some of the finest in contemporary British nature writing.