One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)
The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human "discover the pain and beauty of being alive" (People). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from one of our most unique and transcendent voices.
Review Quotes:
Praise for H Is for Hawk:
* Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
* Shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction
* Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Award in Nonfiction
* The Costa Book of the Year
* Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize
"Breathtaking . . . Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor's fierce essence--and her own--with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don't notice their astonishing engineering." --Vicki Constantine Croke, New York Times Book Review (cover review)"
"One of the loveliest things you'll read this year . . . You'll never see a bird overhead the same way again." --Jason Sheeler, Entertainment Weekly
"[A] singular book that combines memoir and landscape, history and falconry . . . it is not like anything I've ever read . . . what Macdonald tells us so eloquently in her fine memoir [is] that transformation of our docile or resigned lives can be had if we only look up into the world." --Susan Straight, Los Angeles Times
"Had there been an award for the best new book that defies every genre, I imagine it would have won that too. . . . Coherent, complete, and riveting, perhaps the finest nonfiction I read in the past year." --Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker
"One of the most riveting encounters between a human being and an animal ever written." --Simon Worrall, National Geographic
"One of a kind . . . Macdonald is a poet, her language rich and taut. . . . As she descends into a wild, nearly mad connection with her hawk, her words keep powerful track. . . . [She] brings her observer's eye and poet's voice to the universal experience of sorrow and loss." --Barbara Brotman, Chicago Tribune
"The hawk-book's form is perfect. It prickles your skin the way nature can when you are surprised by an animal in your path. Some books are not books but visitations, and this one has crossed its share of thresholds before arriving here, to an impossible middle perch between wilderness and culture, past and present, life and death." --Katy Waldman, Slate
"The echoes of myth in Macdonald's writing, however subtle and unobtrusive, lend her book an emotional weight usually reserved only for literature, and a grace only for poetry. But this is one of the book's great achievements: to belong to several genres at once, and to succeed at all of them." --Madeleine Larue, The Millions
"An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief--with a goshawk. . . . Writing with breathless urgency . . . Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment. Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it's poignant, thoughtful and moving--and likely to become a classic in either genre." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"H is for Hawk is a work of great spirit and wonder, illuminated equally by terror and desire. Each beautiful sentence is capable of taking a reader's breath. The book is built of feather and bone, intelligence and blood, and a vulnerability so profound as to conjure that vulnerability's shadow, which is the great power of honesty. It is not just a definitive work on falconry; it is a definitive work on humanity, and all that can and cannot be possessed." --Rick Bass
"A dazzling piece of work: deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love . . . a deeply human work shot through, like cloth of gold, with intelligence and compassion--an exemplar of the mysterious alchemy by which suffering can be transmuted into beauty. I will be surprised if a better book than H is for Hawk is published this year." --Melissa Harrison, Financial Times
"A book made from the heart that goes to the heart . . . It combines old and new nature and human nature with great originality. No one who has looked up to see a bird of prey cross the sky could read it and not have their life shifted." --Tim Dee, author of The Running Sky
HELEN MACDONALD is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler's Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine. Twitter: @HelenJMacdonald
Grove Press
Pub Date: March 08, 2016
1.1" H x 8.11" L x 5.43" W
320 pages
paperback