H Is for Hawk

Macdonald's argument, told through the memoir of training a goshawk named Mabel after her father's sudden death, is that grief doesn't respond well to willpower or straightforward coping strategies — it demands to be lived through sideways, often through an obsession or discipline that has nothing directly to do with the loss itself. Training a notoriously difficult, wild raptor becomes her way of channeling grief's chaos into something with rules, patience, and incremental progress, even as she recognizes she's using the hawk to avoid her own humanity, trying to become as fierce and unfeeling as the bird rather than facing her sorrow directly.

The book matters because it refuses the comforting arc of a grief memoir that resolves cleanly — Macdonald is honest about how her mourning curdled into something closer to self-destructive withdrawal before it turned back toward connection, and she weaves in T.H. White's own troubled attempt at hawk-training as a cautionary counter-narrative to her own. It's as much a meditation on wildness, Englishness, and the pull toward escaping human grief through animal discipline as it is a conventional memoir.

Who should read it

This suits readers drawn to literary memoir, nature writing, or honest, unsentimental accounts of grief that don't offer easy comfort. It rewards patience with dense, lyrical prose and a narrative that loops between memoir, natural history, and literary biography rather than moving in a straight line.

About the author

Helen Macdonald is a British writer, naturalist, and historian of science who has trained hawks since childhood; H Is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year award.