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“It sings. I couldn’t
stop reading.”
— Mark Haddon, New York Times bestselling author
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“Captivating and beautifully written, it’s a meditation on the bond between beasts and humans and the pain and beauty of being alive.”
— People
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“Macdonald’s first sight of her bird…is one of the most memorable passages I’ve read this year or, for that matter, this decade. The heat of the moment is enough to melt grammar.”
— Time
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“One of the loveliest things you’ll read this year.”
— Entertainment Weekly
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“Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book…is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.”
— New York Times
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“A well-wrought book,
one part memoir, one part gorgeous evocation of the natural world, and one part
literary meditation…The discovery of
the season.”
— Economist
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“A talon-sharp memoir
that will thrill and chill you to the bone…Macdonald has just the right blend
of the scientist and the poet, of observing on the one hand and feeling on the
other.”
— Daily Mail (London)
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“What [Macdonald] has
achieved is a very rare thing in literature—a completely realistic account of a
human relationship with animal consciousness…It is a soaring performance, and Mabel
is the star.”
— Sunday Times (London)
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“A dazzling piece of
work: deeply affecting, utterly fascinating, and blazing with love and intelligence…a
deeply human work shot through, like cloth of gold, with intelligence and
compassion.”
— Financial Times (London)
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“Extends the boundaries of nature
writing. As a naturalist she has somehow acquired her bird’s laser-like visual
acuity. As a writer she combines a lexicographer’s pleasure in words as carefully
curated objects with an inventive passion for new words or for ways of
releasing fresh effects from the old stock.”
— Guardian (London)
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“In
this profoundly inquiring and wholly enrapturing memoir, Macdonald exquisitely
and unforgettably entwines misery and astonishment, elegy and natural history,
human and hawk.”
— Booklist (starred review)
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“Poignant, thoughtful, and moving—and likely to become a classic.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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“[An] elegant synthesis of memoir and literary sleuthing.”
— Publishers Weekly
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“Unexpectedly, Macdonald is an extraordinary, nuanced narrator, whose
elegant voice makes her eloquent prose even more affective.”
— BookPage (audio review)
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“Macdonald reads her own work in an emotionally resonant voice slightly reminiscent of Emma Thompson’s. For readers who have difficulty tracking Macdonald through her multipronged memoir, her narration might be just the ticket.”
— Library Journal (audio review)
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“A deep, dark
work of terrible beauty that will open fissures in the stoniest heart…Macdonald
is a survivor…she has produced one of the most eloquent accounts of bereavement
you could hope to read…A grief memoir with wings.”
— Bookseller
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“This beautiful book
is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration:
elegy for a father lost, celebration of a hawk found—and in the finding also a
celebration of countryside, forbears of one kind and another, life-in-death. At
a time of very distinguished writing about the relationship between human kind
and the environment, it is immediately preeminent.”
— Andrew Motion, author of In the Blood
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“A book made from the
heart that goes to the heart…It combines old and new nature and human nature
with great originality. No one who has looked up to see a bird of prey cross
the sky could read it and not have their life shifted.”
— Tim Dee, author of The Running Sky
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“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, American author
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“The most magical
book I have ever read.”
— Olivia Laing, author of The Trip to Echo Spring
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“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, American writer and environmental activist
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“One of the year’s most acclaimed books, Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk brings together a meditation on grief with observations on the natural world around us.”
— Vol1Brooklyn.com