![]() She tells her friends to leave her alone. ![]() In her grief, to escape into something, she begins to train one of nature’s most vicious predators, a goshawk. She has been obsessed with birds of prey since she was a girl, and is an experienced falconer. When her father, a newspaper photographer, dies suddenly on a London street, it steals the floor from beneath her. Macdonald is British, and when we meet her in this memoir, she is in her 30s, with “no partner, no children, no home.” Her fellowship at the University of Cambridge is coming to an end. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative. ![]() ![]() Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, “H Is for Hawk,” her first published in the United States, reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well. In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, in an essay about the films and fiction of Miranda July, Lorrie Moore writes, “We don’t always know what intimate life consists of until novels tell us.” ![]()
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