H Is for Hawk

Summary

A memoir of grief and obsession that interweaves the author's account of training a goshawk in the months following her father's sudden death with a meditation on the life and falconry writings of T.H. White, who trained a hawk of his own while struggling with loneliness and repressed desires. Macdonald's prose moves between the hawk's alien, predatory consciousness and the raw experience of human mourning in a way that illuminates both, without resolving the tension between wildness and the need for consolation. The book found an enormous readership and is widely credited with energising a new wave of nature writing in Britain.