Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly, and she responded by doing something she had dreamed of since childhood: buying and training a goshawk. *H is for Hawk* is the account of that year — a book about grief that became, almost accidentally, one of the most important works of British nature writing ever published.
Three Books at Once
The book operates on three simultaneous registers. It is a precise, detailed account of training a female goshawk — named Mabel — from an untamed eyas to a flying, hunting hawk. It is a grief memoir of unusual emotional honesty. And it is a critical biography-within-a-memoir of T.H. White, the author of The Once and Future King, whose own attempt to train a goshawk in the 1930s became both a record of failure and a study in damaged masculinity.
Macdonald uses White as a shadow — someone who attempted the same thing she is doing and for similarly unconscious reasons, but with different results. The comparison is devastating and generous in equal measure.
The Goshawk as Mirror
A hawk does not grieve. It does not remember the past or anticipate the future. It lives entirely in the present moment of stimulus and response. Macdonald finds this not peaceful but terrifying: in her grief, she is drawn toward the hawk’s non-humanity, the erasure of the self that it seems to offer. The book’s emotional arc is her recognition of that danger and her slow, painful return to the human world.
The natural history material is exceptional — Macdonald is a historian of science who has worked with raptors her whole life, and her descriptions of goshawk behaviour, physiology, and the practice of falconry are among the finest in the literature.
Grief is the price we pay for love, and the price is always fair. But grief changes you, and I was changing into something I did not recognise.
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
6 Key Ideas From This Book
Macdonald's central insight: in grief, we are tempted by the non-human — by animals, landscapes, substances — because they seem to offer escape from the specifically human pain of loss. But the escape is a trap. What we need is other humans.
Training a hawk requires total, moment-to-moment presence — the hawk reads and responds to your body language before you know you've expressed it. Macdonald finds that this enforced presence is both the thing that saves her and the thing that distances her from the world she needs to return to.
White trained his hawk as a form of self-punishment — he was a repressed gay man in a homophobic society who found in falconry a legitimised form of controlled cruelty. Macdonald reads his failure as a failure of self-knowledge: he was using the hawk, not attending to it.
Macdonald walks the same Suffolk fields with Mabel throughout the year, and the book is also a portrait of a specific English landscape. The relationship between inner grief and outer landscape is not metaphorical — it is experienced as one thing.
A recurring theme: our tendency to see animals as reflections of ourselves rather than as beings with their own alien interiority. Macdonald resists this consciously throughout the book, and her attempts to know Mabel on Mabel's own terms are part of what makes the book exceptional.
Working with a hawk is entirely physical — the hawk responds to muscle tension, heartbeat, pupil dilation. Macdonald's grief also lives in her body. One of the book's subtlest achievements is its account of how embodied and cognitive knowing are inseparable.
Any Weaknesses?
The book’s tripartite structure — memoir, falconry manual, White biography — is ambitious and mostly successful, but some readers find the White sections interrupts the emotional flow. The biography of White is fascinating in itself but occasionally feels like a different book smuggled inside this one.
Some of the grief memoir sections in the middle of the book, when Macdonald is most isolated and hawk-consumed, can feel repetitive. This is probably inevitable — grief is repetitive — but it tests the reader’s patience.
Anyone who has experienced significant loss and wants to read a book that handles grief with intellectual rigour and emotional honesty rather than therapeutic consolation.
The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd for the same practice of deep landscape attention from a different vantage point, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer for the relational ethics of human-nonhuman encounter.
Psychologists and grief counsellors. The book is one of the most accurate and unsentimental accounts of acute grief in modern literature, and it describes mechanisms — the draw toward the nonhuman, the loss of social connection — that clinical frameworks often miss.
This is a book about grief, and it does not resolve it neatly. Readers in acute bereavement should approach with care. It is more honest than comforting.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is H is for Hawk worth reading?
H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, and both were deserved. It is one of the most complete books published in Britain in the past twenty years — a grief memoir that is also a natural history, a biography, and a philosophical investigation of what it means to be human by spending time with something that is not. Exceptional.
Who should read H is for Hawk?
Anyone who has experienced significant loss and wants to read a book that handles grief with intellectual rigour and emotional honesty rather than therapeutic consolation.
What is H is for Hawk about in one sentence?
Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly, and she responded by doing something she had dreamed of since childhood: buying and training a goshawk.
The Verdict
*H is for Hawk* won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, and both were deserved. It is one of the most complete books published in Britain in the past twenty years — a grief memoir that is also a natural history, a biography, and a philosophical investigation of what it means to be human by spending time with something that is not. Exceptional.
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