H Is For Hawk The Birds & Bees

As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books including T.H. Whites tortured masterpiece "The Goshawk " which describes Whites struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for 800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone ready to embark on the long strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. Destined to be a classic of nature writing "H is for Hawk" is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonalds struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawks taming and her own untaming. At the same time its a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White best known for "The Once and Future King." Its a book about memory nature and nation and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.