H is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is a memoir, a nature book, and an extended literary argument about what it means to lose someone. After the sudden death of her press photographer father, Macdonald, a Cambridge historian and lifelong falconer, falls into a private grief that ordinary life cannot reach, and she does what trained austringers throughout English history have done in moments of crisis: she buys a goshawk. She names the bird Mabel and moves the two of them into a small Cambridge cottage, where she teaches herself to live alongside an ancient predator while reading T. H. White's troubled 1951 memoir The Goshawk in the evenings. The book braids three strands, Macdonald's mourning, her physical training of Mabel through autumn fields, and a critical biography of White, into a single meditation on loneliness, masculinity, predator and prey. The result won the Samuel Johnson and Costa book prizes and reset the bar for British nature writing in the 2010s.
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After her father's sudden death, a Cambridge scholar buys a goshawk named Mabel and trains her on Cambridgeshire fields. Her own grief tangles with the long-dead author T.H. White and his ruined hawk.
Yes. H is for Hawk is Helen Macdonald's 2014 memoir about training a goshawk in the year following her father's death. It blends grief memoir, falconry, and reflection on T.H. White's earlier book The Goshawk.
Yes. H is for Hawk won the 2014 Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize. It was a New York Times bestseller and is widely considered one of the great nature memoirs of the 21st century.
H is for Hawk was written by Helen Macdonald, published in 2006 by Monokl.
H is for Hawk is 349 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, H is for Hawk takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
H is for Hawk is a standalone novel by Helen Macdonald, not part of a series.
H is for Hawk is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
