Book Club Guide

H Is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald · 2014 · Nature & Environment

Key themes

Grief and the goshawk — training a wild creature as a way of surviving loss
T.H. White's own troubled relationship with hawks, woven through the memoir
The English landscape as something to be walked through grief

About this book

Training a goshawk while grieving a father; a fierce, beautiful memoir of nature and loss.

Published in 2014, H Is for Hawk won the Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction — a rare double. Macdonald wrote it in the years following her father's sudden death.

Discussion questions

Macdonald begins training a goshawk shortly after her father's death. How does she develop the relationship between grief and the brutal, demanding work of falconry?
T.H. White — author of The Once and Future King — wrote his own book about training a hawk, and Macdonald weaves his troubled life through her narrative. What does this parallel achieve?
The goshawk, Mabel, is rendered with extraordinary specificity — her violence, her beauty, her wildness. How does Macdonald avoid sentimentalising the bird while still conveying intense feeling for her?
The memoir moves between intense physical description of falconry and reflection on grief and identity. How does Macdonald balance these registers?
H Is for Hawk won the Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize. What does it do that earns recognition across both literary and nonfiction categories?