H is for Hawk

I'm not a hunter, and I'm not mad for animals, but great writing is great writing, and this book is great writing. Helen Macdonald's dad collapses and dies abruptly, and Macdonald is bereft. She takes on a goshawk and begins to read about author T. H. White's encounters with hunting birds and starts to write about her father, and she slowly begins to re engage with the world. The vocabulary she uses in this book is beautiful and perfect and her descriptions—of the goshawk, of the world where she hunts, of her desperate sadness—are defiantly evocative. She masterfully binds together all her story lines in this brilliant picture of love and loss and the natural world.