Need a copy from the library? There are copies of the book set aside for members of the club at the Perth-Dupont Library, including extended loan periods! Just say you're a member of the Afterlight Book Club.

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Hawks don’t grieve. Hawks don’t hurt. Hawks hunt. Hawks kill. So it was that one damp early morning on a Scottish quayside a man opened a cardboard box in front of me and brought out a flapping, terrifying bird with curved black talons and lambent silver eyes. I called her Mabel, and brought her back to Cambridge to start our new life.

When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer—Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood—she’d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White's chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself “in the hawk's wild mind to tame her” tested the limits of Macdonald’s humanity and changed her life.

Heart-wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, with a parallel examination of a legendary writer’s eccentric falconry. Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

Zalina Alvi

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H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

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Need a copy from the library? There are copies of the book set aside for members of the club at the Perth-Dupont Library, including extended loan periods! Just say you're a member of the Afterlight Book Club.

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