H Is for Hawk (published in 2014), is author Helen Macdonald's memoir. Set over a period of a year, Macdonald chronicles the time she spent training a northern goshawk after the death of her father, whom she loved dearly (her father, by the way, was a man named Alisdair Macdonald and was an acclaimed photojournalist best known for his work at The Daily Mirror). Grieving and heartbroken, Macdonald buys and aforementioned norther goshawk help cope with the death of her father. She called her hawk Mabel. Mabel helped Macdonald not only learn a lot about herself, but also aided her through her grieving process after she lost her father.
At release, H Is for Hawk was both a financial and critical success. Two weeks after being published, the book got put on The Sunday Times bestseller list. Writing for Time, Lev Grossman writes: "Macdonald's first sight of her bird, when the breeder lifts her out of the cardboard box she travels in, is one of the most memorable passages I've read this year, or for that matter this decade." The book also won a number of awards, including the Samuel Johnson Prize.
