Her absolute eloquence with descriptions of the birds and landscapes and the thrill of the natural world makes the memoir compelling. Macdonald read the book as a child and was appalled she, whose twin brother died shortly after their birth, who feels loss and displacement throughout her childhood, rereads the book as an adult with a goshawk named Mabel. Famous for “The Sword in the Stone,” he also wrote “The Goshawk,” his own memoir, in which a tortured man who suffered a peculiarly English childhood of beatings and disdain recounts his inept and finally cruel attempts to train a goshawk. One of the most compelling facets of the memoir is the way the writer, who knows from childhood that she is a “watcher” of other humans and feels more comfortable with nature, weaves in multiple histories: those of Great Britain, of falconers and birds of prey all over the world, and especially, the story of T.H. A veteran falconer, she chose this time to inhabit the world with a goshawk, “spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets.” In this singular book that combines memoir and landscape, history and falconry, Macdonald robs from her anger by choosing to train and live with a robber bird, and in doing so, she becomes wild. When her beloved father died in London, Helen Macdonald slipped past grief into a melancholic depression, and as a poet, naturalist and close observer of nature and words, she identified what she felt and what she intuitively needed.

Helen macdonald goshawk