Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | H is for Hawk | 2014 | Helen Macdonald | Buy |
H is for Hawk (2014) is Helen Macdonald’s memoir about training a goshawk named Mabel in the wake of her father’s sudden death. The book interweaves three threads: Macdonald’s own experience learning falconry, the story of T.H. White’s troubled attempt to train a goshawk in the 1930s, and her grief over her father’s passing.
The result is a book that works as nature writing, literary biography, and personal memoir all at once. Macdonald’s prose is precise and closely observed, whether she is describing the hawk’s behavior on the fist or the disorientation of bereavement. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year in 2014.