Changes

|title=H is for Hawk

|author=Helen Macdonald

|publisher=Jonathan Cape

|date=July 2014

|website=http://fretmarks.blogspot.co.uk/

|summary=In this completely original blend of memoir, biography and nature writing, Macdonald reveals how falconry helped her heal after her father's sudden death.

}}

When I saw Helen Macdonald speak at a nature conference, she recounted a conversation with a Samuel Johnson Prize judge. S/he had remarked that Macdonald's was three books in one: a memoir of grief after her father's unexpected death, a biography of T. H. White, and an account of falconry experiments with Mabel the goshawk. Macdonald quipped that the description made her book sound like washing powder, but it's accurate nonetheless, and explains why the book won the Samuel Johnson Prize (the first memoir to do so) and is shortlisted for the Costa Biography award.

Further reading suggestion: [[The Iceberg: A Memoir by Marion Coutts]], another of the year's best memoirs, shares the theme of grief. [[Birds in a Cage by Derek Niemann]] is a story of ornithology giving hope in desperate situations. And what do you know, there's a goshawk in [[The Sword in the Stone by T H White]].

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