Macdonald trains a goshawk in the aftermath of her father’s death. That description makes it sound like a grief memoir with a bird in it. It is not. It is a book about wildness — in the hawk, in the landscape, in the self — and it is one of the finest pieces of nature writing produced in this country in decades.
The T.H. White thread running through it (she’s also writing about The Goshawk, his account of training a hawk in the 1930s) adds a layer of literary history that never feels academic. Macdonald writes about the natural world with the precision of a scientist and the instincts of a poet. This won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Both were correct.
Year 2014
Price £9.99
Category Nature Writing