“I have to write about him here because he was there. The cleverly interwoven stories – White’s struggle both with his goshawk and his own homosexuality, and the author’s journey through grief with her young hawk at her side – speak to one another subtly and unexpectedly. In doing so, she is following in the footsteps of TH White, author of the Arthurian tetralogy The Once And Future King (1958), whose lesser-known book The Goshawk (1951) records his own, desperately sad (and sadly misguided) battle to bend a hawk to his will. In the midst of it, lost and desperate, she obeys an arcane impulse: to acquire and train that most wild and difficult of British raptors – the goshawk. But when her father, the acclaimed press photographer Alisdair Macdonald, dies suddenly, she finds herself cast into that phantasmagorical otherworld of shock and grief that is perilously close to madness. Obsessed by birds of prey since she was a child, she trained as a falconer and has worked on raptor research and conservation projects in Europe and Asia, lectured on falcons and falconry, and bred hunting falcons for Arab royalty. Helen Macdonald is a Cambridge historian, illustrator and naturalist.
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