H Is for Hawk
by Helen Macdonald
Summary
When Helen Macdonald's father, the photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, died suddenly of a heart attack, his daughter, a Cambridge historian of science and a falconer since childhood, did something grief sometimes does: she followed an obsession all the way in. She bought a young goshawk, the fiercest and most neurotic of the trainable raptors, named her Mabel, drew the curtains of her Cambridge house, and disappeared into the ancient, obsessive discipline of manning a hawk.
The book braids three strands. The grief memoir, written with a rawness that never curdles into performance: a woman going quietly feral, ducking human contact, living on freezer meals and the hawk's schedule. The falconry itself, rendered in the most exact and sensuous prose the subject has ever had, the weighing, the flying at hedgerows, the terrible day the hawk is lost and found. And, threaded through, a shadow biography of T. H. White, author of The Once and Future King, whose 1951 book The Goshawk records his own disastrous, cruel, yearning attempt at the same art, a damaged man Macdonald reads with clear eyed compassion as the counter example: what happens when you ask a hawk to carry your wounds.
The hawk cannot grieve and cannot pretend, which is exactly the medicine: Mabel drags her back, kill by kill, into the world of things.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the grief memoir and the nature book fused at the highest level either form has reached, with a dead falconer haunting the margins.
Historical Context & Significance
H Is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014 and then the Costa Book of the Year across all categories, a double almost never achieved, and became an international bestseller within weeks, the judges praising the marriage of genres.
Its success remade a shelf: the new nature writing that had been gathering since Macfarlane and Deakin acquired its breakout classic, and the hybrid of memoir, species and literary biography became the form of the decade, imitated to the point of parody by writers with smaller wounds and duller birds.
Helen Macdonald, historian of science, poet and former falcon breeder, followed it with the essay collection Vesper Flights and, with Sin Blaché, a thriller under a joint byline. A television documentary retraced the training with a new hawk, and a feature film adaptation with Claire Foy arrived in 2025. Mabel herself died of aspergillosis in 2014, the year the book appeared.