Hawk Soars
Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (Grove Press, March 3, 2015; OverDrive Sample), a memoir about how she dealt with the painful loss of her beloved father by training a goshawk, is gaining attention on this side of the ocean after receiving both high praise and strong sales in Britain. Macdonald won both the Costa Book Award for Biography (scroll to page 3 to see the announcement) and the Costa Book of the Year in January as well as The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (the UK’s highest award for nonfiction) last November.
In the daily NYT this week, Dwight Garner raves:
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. Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.
This Sunday’s NYT Book Review features it on the cover (a rare occurrence for a book that hasn’t yet been released; we can’t remember the last time the NYT BR gave such prominence to an upcoming book):
In her breathtaking new book … Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence — and her own — with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.
Some libraries are showing heavy holds and rising on modest orders while a few have yet to order. Now’s the time to buy it ahead of the stampede.