Praise for H Is for Hawk: *** Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

• Shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction
• Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Award in Nonfiction
• The Costa Book of the Year
• Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize**

"Breathtaking . . . Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence—and her own—with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering." —Vicki Constantine Croke, New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, H Is for Hawk, reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well. Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative. . . . [An] instant classic." —Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Extraordinary . . . indelible . . . [it contains] one of the most memorable passages I’ve read this year, or for that matter this decade . . . Mabel is described so vividly she becomes almost physically present on the page." —Lev Grossman, TIME

"Captivating and beautifully written, it’s a meditation on the bond between beasts and humans and the pain and beauty of being alive." —People** (Book of the Week)**

"One of the loveliest things you’ll read this year . . . You’ll never see a bird overhead the same way again." —Jason Sheeler, Entertainment Weekly

"[A] singular book that combines memoir and landscape, history and falconry . . . it is not like anything I've ever read . . . what Macdonald tells us so eloquently in her fine memoir [is] that transformation of our docile or resigned lives can be had if we only look up into the world." —Susan Straight, Los Angeles Times

"Had there been an award for the best new book that defies every genre, I imagine it would have won that too. . . . Coherent, complete, and riveting, perhaps the finest nonfiction I read in the past year." —Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker

"The art of Macdonald’s book is in the way that she weaves together various kinds of falling apart—the way she loops one unraveling thread of meaning into another. . . . What’s lovely about [it] is the clarity with which she sees both the inner and outer worlds that she lives in." —Caleb Crain, New York Review of Books

"One of the most riveting encounters between a human being and an animal ever written." —Simon Worrall, National Geographic

"Assured, honest and raw . . . a soaring wonder of a book." —Daneet Steffens, Boston Globe

"An elegantly written amalgam of nature writing, personal memoir, literary portrait and an examination of bereavement. . . . It illuminates unexpected things in unexpected ways." —Guy Gavriel Kay, Washington Post

"To categorize this work as merely memoir, nature writing or spiritual writing would understate [Macdonald’s] achievement . . . her prose glows and burns." —Karin Altenberg, Wall Street Journal

"Dazzling." —Kate Guadagnino, Vogue

"Unsparing, fierce . . . a superior accomplishment. There’s not a line here that rings false; every insight is hard won . . . Macdonald has found the ideal balance between art and truth." —David Laskin, Seattle Times

"One of the best books about nature that I've ever read. Macdonald's wonderful gift for language and her keen observations bring pleasure to every page." —Karen Sandstrom, Cleveland Plain Dealer

"[With] sumptuously poetic prose . . . there is deft interplay between agony and ecstasy, elegy and rebirth, wildness and domesticity, alongside subtle reminders about the cruelty of nature and our necessary faith in humanity." —Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"One of a kind . . . Macdonald is a poet, her language rich and taut. . . . As she descends into a wild, nearly mad connection with her hawk, her words keep powerful track. . . . [She] brings her observer's eye and poet's voice to the universal experience of sorrow and loss." —Barbara Brotman, Chicago Tribune

"A heart-poundingly good read." —Helen W. Mallon, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Incandescent . . . glorious, passionate, and heartbreaking." —Sy Montgomery, Orion

"A triumph." —Nick Willoughby, Salon

"The hawk-book's form is perfect. It prickles your skin the way nature can when you are surprised by an animal in your path. Some books are not books but visitations, and this one has crossed its share of thresholds before arriving here, to an impossible middle perch between wilderness and culture, past and present, life and death." —Katy Waldman, Slate

"A genre-busting dazzler of a book, worthy of the near-universal accolades that it's received so far." —Elisabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire

"Extraordinary . . . Macdonald elegantly weaves multitudinous and extremely complex issues into a single work of seamless prose." —Lucy Scholes, The Daily Beast

"The echoes of myth in Macdonald’s writing, however subtle and unobtrusive, lend her book an emotional weight usually reserved only for literature, and a grace only for poetry. But this is one of the book’s great achievements: to belong to several genres at once, and to succeed at all of them." —Madeleine Larue, The Millions

"[Macdonald’s] writing—about soil and weather, myth and history, pain and its slow easing—retains the qualities of [her hawk] Mabel's wild heart, and the commanding scope and piercing accuracy of her hawk's eye." —Joanna Scutts, Newsday

"Brutal yet redemptive . . . a real stunner." —Alexis Burling, The Oregonian

"Gorgeous." —Diane Rehm, The Diane Rehm Show

"A wonder both of nature and of meditative writing." —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air with Terry Gross

"To read Helen Macdonald's new memoir is to have every cell of your body awake and alive." —Robin Young, Here and Now*
*
"In this profoundly inquiring and wholly enrapturing memoir, Macdonald exquisitely and unforgettably entwines misery and astonishment, elegy and natural history, human and hawk." —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk. . . . Writing with breathless urgency . . . Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment. Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it's poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre." —Kirkus Reviews** (starred review)**

"A unique and beautiful book with a searing emotional honesty, and descriptive language that is unparalleled in modern literature." —Costa Book Award citation

"H is for Hawk is a work of great spirit and wonder, illuminated equally by terror and desire. Each beautiful sentence is capable of taking a reader’s breath. The book is built of feather and bone, intelligence and blood, and a vulnerability so profound as to conjure that vulnerability’s shadow, which is the great power of honesty. It is not just a definitive work on falconry; it is a definitive work on humanity, and all that can and cannot be possessed." —Rick Bass

"A lovely touching book about a young woman grieving over the death of her father becoming rejuvenated by training one of the roughest, most difficult creatures in the heavens, the goshawk." —Jim Harrison

"It just sings. I couldn't stop reading." **—Mark Haddon, author…