Natural-born killer brings grieving author back to life

by Helen Macdonald
Jonathan Cape

Death runs like a tangled thread throughout the pages of Helen Macdonald's gripping new book, H is for Hawk, which blends her brutally honest, sometimes tortured account of dealing with grief and - in a deliberate decision to take on a challenge - her fascinating struggles to tame one of nature's most revered killers: a goshawk.

She also cleverly weaves into the narrative a biography of tortured English novelist T.H. White, whose book The Goshawk - detailing his unsuccessful efforts to train his bird, Gos - fired her imagination for falconry as an eight year-old and later inspired her own attempt.

The Cambridge university historian, poet and falconer saw her cosy, ordered world fall apart when her father, press photographer Alisdair Macdonald, died from a heart attack while on assignment one stormy night in London.

"For weeks I felt I was made of dully burning metal," she writes. "I was convinced, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that if I'd been put on a bed or a chair I'd have burned right through."