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The best books that explore how nature benefits our mental health

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The best books for nature lovers

The best memoirs of all time including Michelle Obama's Becoming, Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, Chanel Miller's Know My Name and Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy.

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Vesper Flights

The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of H is for Hawk

From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes a transcendent collection of essays about the natural world

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
'Thrilling dispatches from a vanishing world' Observer 
 
Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. 
 
From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. 
 
Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches. 
 
Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century's greatest nature writers. A perfect read for anyone looking for renewed appreciation for the natural world. 
 
'Helen Macdonald is one of the best nature writers now working' The Telegraph

Thrilling dispatches from a vanishing world... A powerful - and entertaining - corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species.

Vesper Flights is a book of ideas and urgent, beautiful writing... [Macdonald] is a writer whose every word is to be cherished.

Helen Macdonald is one of the best nature writers now working.

Nature writing at its best... All kinds of wondrous... Each and every essay reminded me what a gifted writer Macdonald is. Her prose is poetry but it also has a drenching kind of a clarity. And this is good because we shouldn't allow ourselves to be lulled by the sheer pleasure of reading her. For these are urgent pieces designed to open our eyes.

An antidote to so much romantic, reductive writing about the natural world... Macdonald's writing teems with other voices and perspectives, with her own challenges to herself. It muddies any facile ideas about nature and the human, and prods at how we pleat our prejudices, politics and desires into our notions of the animal world... Hers is a gritty, companionable intimacy with the wild... The essays...are short, varied and highly edible.

Those who have read Helen Macdonald's memoir H is for Hawk will be familiar with her ability to weave together natural, cultural and personal history and to tease out the deeper meanings of our encounters with the wild... She applies her bright, sensitive prose to encounters with swifts and a solitary boar; to the magic of woods in winter or a chalk quarry dotted with glow-worms on a hot summer's night. Her capacity for wonder is infectious.

An excellent collection... Macdonald is so joyously and excitedly in love with the natural world around her it is difficult not to share in this rapture, but so, too, in her sense of loss... Compelling and urgent.

[Macdonald's] prose is poetic but it also has a drenching clarity... These are urgent pieces designed to open our eyes to the parlous state of the environment... A vital book for now because it... shows us that in respecting this diversity lies both the joy and unity of our own species.

Full of treasures... Couched in scientific learning... The pleasures of Vesper Flights are the pleasures of any literature; the lucidity of thought, the sensual tactility of the words (Macdonald can make you feel the bristle of the beetles that catch in her hair on a summer night), the comfort of the familiar and the thrill of the strange. But it is combined here with a real urgency, an awareness of our human imprint on the world and the damage that is doing.

A powerful collection of essays... Sensitive and intelligent, these essays are full of gorgeous images and moving insights... A perfect escape.

One of this century's greatest nature writers.

BBC Science Focus Magazine *Books of the Year*

Vivid, deeply informed, emotionally charged... [Vesper Flights] can startle you.

Helen Macdonald's series of studies...show a remarkable eloquence, intelligence and empathy... Unfailingly acute.

From reflections on her childhood love of animals to sharp observations on the migrations of songbirds, the author of H is for Hawk fills her essay collection with vivid appreciation for the wildlife that surrounds us.

Helen Macdonald's new essays are no flights of fancy, as she examines who has the right to define and be the gatekeepers to the natural world... [Vesper Flights shares] many of the qualities of H is for Hawk - frankness, reflective thinking, formidable powers of observation and wordcraft.

Macdonald is a glorious writer... This book will make you look a bit harder at the wonders around you.

Interesting and accomplished... Vesper Flights establishes her [Macdonald] as a penetrating analyst of the relationship between humans and the non-human world... She is splendid company reflecting on nests and the meaning of home and place.

I finished the book seeing the natural world, and my place within it, afresh.

One of this century's greatest nature writers, Helen Macdonald takes simple moments - of nesting birds, wild boars emerging from the woods, foraging for mushrooms on an autumn day - and weaves them with history, personal reflection and political comment.

H is for Hawk turned many a reader into a goshawk fan... This lyrical essay collection also explores human relationships with the natural world, but has a wider scope, taking in a search for the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests and swan-upping on the Thames.

Vesper Flights...reminds us we too are part of the natural world.

Vesper Flights...[takes] the reader on exhilarating adventures.

This nature writer's long-awaited follow-up to her influential 2014 memoir H is for Hawk is a treat: dive into essays about headaches and high-rises, catching swans and farming ostriches.

Their subject matter is marvellously diverse, taking in nests, ants, hares, glow-worms, mushrooms, migration and more... These are urgent pieces designed to open our eyes to the state of the environment.

Vesper Flights is a book of tremendous purpose.

Gorgeously evocative prose, original insights and deep knowledge.

[Macdonald's] beautifully written essays go a long way to improving our perception.

A collection of wonderfully evocative essays on wildlife.

[An] urgently beautiful book about the haunted meanings of belonging in the world.

Time Magazine *10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020*

Vesper Flights weaves a beautiful proposition: by noticing how wonder arises and flows, we can learn something about what it means to be alive.

These individual essays are about badgers and ants, goldfinches and swans, but through their constellation Macdonald is able to get at something fundamental about the human condition.

I should have started reading Helen Macdonald a long time ago and now I'm unlikely to stop. These essays and reflections are just as compelling as her celebrated H is for Hawk, and come together as a kind of manual for being in the world as you look at it.

Lovely, thoughtful and sometimes sobering essays on the vanishing natural world.

This book is a powerful - and entertaining - corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species.

Macdonald has a wonderful gift for exploring the intersection between nature and our experience of it, in writing that is both lyrical and impassioned.

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and historian. Her book H is for Hawk won many prizes, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Costa Book of the Year, the Prix due Meilleur Livre Etranger in France, and in the US was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She writes a regular column in New York Times Magazine, and lives in Suffolk.

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
'Thrilling dispatches from a vanishing world' Observer 
 
Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. 
 
From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. 
 
Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches. 
 
Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century's greatest nature writers. 
 
'Helen Macdonald is one of the best nature writers now working' The Telegraph

Vintage Minis

Recovery

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, naturalist and historian of science. Their books include H is for Hawk, which won many prizes including the Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and the Sunday Times bestselling Vesper Flights. They live in Suffolk with their two parrots.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. 
 
 How do we carry on when someone close to us dies? Is it simply a case of putting one foot in front of the other in a bleak new world or do we need something more? Reeling with grief after the sudden death of her father, Helen Macdonald found herself turning to the wild for comfort. With breathtaking honesty and insight, she recounts her months spent taming a goshawk and how, finally, this strange kinship led her to the first tentative steps to recovery. 
 
 Selected from H is for Hawk 
 
 VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
 A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. 
 
 Discover the Vintage Minis ‘Head Space’ series: 
 
 Therapy by Stephen Grosz 
 Family by Mark Haddon

H is for Hawk

**WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
 
**WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION** 
 
**WINNER OF THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER** 
 
'Dazzling... Deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence' Financial Times

Discover the memoir that inspired the major new film starring Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson 
 
The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. 
 
An instant international bestseller and prize-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising a goshawk has soared into the hearts of millions of readers. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human discover the pain and beauty of being alive. 
 
H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying masterpiece on grief, memory, taming and untaming, and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love. 
 
'An absolute classic of nature writing’ Guardian 
'It just sings. I couldn't stop reading' Mark Haddon 
‘One of the best grief books ever written’ Cariad Lloyd

This beautiful book is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration: elegy for a father lost, celebration of a hawk found - and in the finding also a celebration of countryside, forbears of one kind and another, life-in-death. At a time of very distinguished writing about the relationship between human kind and the environment, it is immediately pre-eminent.

I'm convinced it's going to be an absolute classic of nature writing.

I can't remember the last time a book made me feel so many different things in such quick succession.

Nature-writing, but not as you know it. Astounding.

A talon-sharp memoir that will thrill and chill you to the bone... Fascinating.

Soars beyond genres, and burns with emotional and intellectual intensity.

A soliloquy that sings from the pages. Truly beautiful.

Never has the eye of a raptor assumed such fearful, beautiful meaning.

Big-hearted, joyful and blazing with gorgeous descriptions of nature, H is for Hawk is an unusual but very special memoir.

As phenomenal, unusual, moving and agile as a fearsome bird of prey.

An elegant, disturbing and heart-warming book.

A brilliantly beautiful evocation which interweaves her experiences as an austringer, a grieving daughter, an academic and simply a human being.

It is moving and personal in a way that few books of this kind are.

H is for Hawk is a mature, accomplished work: a touchstone for future memoirs, bibliomemoirs, and writing that deals with the natural environment and the self.

Beautifully written and interposed with literary references, it will captivate book lovers and bird lovers alike.

This is an encounter with a bird many of us only dream of seeing in the wild, so read this and fill a void.

H is for Hawk deserves its acclaim as a classic of its kind.

It really has been a privilege to read this book.

Although grief is the engine of the story, its most exceptional aspect is the beauty and force of its descriptions of birds and landscape, and its real star is the goshawk.

The winner of this year's Samuel Johnson Prize is one of the most captivating books I've read.

It is in no way a misery memoir. It is uplifting, poetic, exhilarating.

What makes the book outstanding is the beauty of her prose. It rightly won the prize.

I have never read anything that evokes the strange and broken landscape of bereavement more accurately.

Ultimately uplifting about the power of life, this has to be one of the best books of the year.

It is a timeless classic that leaves you wondering how you did without it before.

Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.

Macdonald writes poignantly but avoids sentimentality on taking her reader on this journey of discovery and ultimately of liberation

H is for Hawk, her memoir of loss, writing, recovery and nature, drawing ingeniously on the life and work of T.H. White, covered this territory with ferocious honesty and eloquence

Combines lyrical nature writing with moving introspection.

A lyrical, moving probe into both the process of mourning and our relationship with the natural world.

Martin Chilton, Olivia Petter and Ceri Radford

Discover the number one bestselling phenomenon that is a powerful and profound mediation on grief expressed through the trials of training a goshawk. 
 
**SELECTED BY CARIAD LLOYD ON BBC TWO'S BETWEEN THE COVERS** 
 
As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer, learning the arcane terminology and reading all the classic books. Years later, when her father died and she was struck deeply by grief, she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She bought Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. 
 
H is for Hawk is an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. This is a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love. 
 
'This beautiful book is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration' Andrew Motion 
 
'It just sings. I couldn't stop reading' Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time 
 
'Dazzling... Deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence' Financial Times

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation

Falcon And The Hawk, The

Helen Macdonald (Author, Reader) Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, naturalist and historian of science. Their books include H is for Hawk, which won many prizes including the Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and the Sunday Times bestselling Vesper Flights. They live in Suffolk with their two parrots.

Helen Macdonald is a falconer and poet. She keeps a goshawk called Mabel. As a child she fell in love with a rare book of intense nature writing, J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, which records a winter watching wild peregrines on the Essex coast. Her new play brings her birds and his together. Baker tramps the bleak coastal marshes scanning the skies for fleeting moments of bloody drama as a peregrine stoops at immense speed after a plover or a pigeon. Helen woos her captive-bred goshawk in her spare bedroom - acclimatising it to human noise and human movement. Baker crouches over a half-dead pigeon and finishes it off for the wild falcon; Helen walks the city street with a goshawk on her fist. Their stories begin to fly closer to one another. Starring David Birrell as J. A. Baker, Gemma Lawrence as Young Helen and Helen Macdonald as herself. Part recorded on location at The Bird of Prey Centre in Newent, Gloucestershire. Producer: Tim Dee.

Helen Macdonald

Sin Blaché

Bold, brilliant. Prophet is hypnotically enthralling, frightening, fearless, funny and full of heart. I loved it

Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End

You are in for a treat… If you like shows such as Twin Peaks, Stranger Things and Lost you will no doubt like this

A queer sci-fi and espionage thriller that asks what would happen if our happiest memories could be weaponised against us...

Top 30 Game-Changing LGBTQ+ Novels of the Last 30 Years

Skilfully constructed, its authors deploying the grammar of science fiction with ease and achieving moments of grim humour as well as horror

Prophet promises to bring back everything you lost and now yearn for... Proper science fiction - self-aware, funny, ruthlessly propulsive, full of invention... I loved it

M. John Harrison, author of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

A fast-paced techno thriller... High-octane... The novel is immense fun, a work of exceptional storytelling skill and stylistic panache

A madcap sci-fi romp, which combines a bananas plot with some very touching writing on grief, nostalgia and love

Prophet is a sui generis and rather wonderful collaboration between Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché

Prophet is a page-turner in which object-oriented philosophy sits comfortably alongside military acronyms - and with a handful of familiar horror tropes to boot

You are in for a treat... If you like such shows as Twin Peaks, Stranger Things and Lost you will no doubt like this. There is even a little wink at The X-Files... Entertaining, erudite and eerie

A trippy, philosophical science-fiction novel with the pacing of a thriller and the pulse of a romance

Prophet is a crackling, shape-shifting romp with big ideas and a bigger heart. Blaché and Macdonald take a no-holds-barred approach to manifesting the ways in which individual desires are exploited by the systems we live under, and ask the necessary question of whether escape from that cycle is possible. This is a display of sheer inventiveness, and a delight

C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills is Gold

Prophet is a wildly fun, inventive, funny, and terrifying book, with a superb mystery that gets ever more compelling and weird and, horrifyingly, familiar. This book finds the nightmare in the comforting lies we tell ourselves about our pasts, and how they inform our present

A genre-blending SF fantasy thriller about the weaponisation of nostalgia

Guardian, *Books to Look Out for in 2023*

There's no denying the strength of Blanche and MacDonald's prose, and the book's very timely themes

An ambitious first novel from this duo — I can’t wait to see what they come up with next

At its heart Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché’s tightly wound (yet somehow tender?) mystery-sci-fi-thriller is a philosophical novel… What is life without mystery? And at what point does nostalgia grow so strong it derails our lives?

Literary Hub, *Best Books of Summer 2023*

A hyperkinetic headrush of a novel that proves its organic bona fides by getting you drunk with ideas before casually and cataclysmically breaking your heart

Paraic O’Donnell, author of The Maker of Swans

Prophet is an electrifying, high-concept fusion of queer science-fiction and espionage thriller that is entrancing, exciting and original

Absorbing, fast-paced and febrile, Prophet takes you through the world at an angle, exposing cracks in the reality we think we inhabit. An exhilarating and surprisingly tender trip

G. Willow Wilson, author of Alif the Unseen

Fresh... A surprising and unexpected blend of surreal science fiction, action thriller and slow-burn 
queer romance, character-driven with a depth rarely encounter in SFF. Highly recommended

A mysterious event 
An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. More and more objects materialise: toys, fairground rides, pets and other treasured mementos of the past. 
 
A weapon like no other 
The deaths quickly follow. A devastating weapon &ndash; Prophet &ndash; is bringing these memories to life, then stifling innocent people with their own joy. But nobody knows who created it, or why. 
 
A fight for the future 
Sunil Rao and Adam Rubenstein are tasked with investigating this strange new reality. After a troubled past together, they are drawn closer than ever to defend what they both hold most dear&hellip;

Helen Macdonald

Praise for Prophet

Prophet is a blast

A thrilling dystopian novel

**Bold, brilliant. Prophet is hypnotically enthralling**, frightening, fearless, funny and full of heart. I loved it

Prophet is a blast

A thrilling dystopian novel

**Bold, brilliant. Prophet is hypnotically enthralling**, frightening, fearless, funny and full of heart. I loved it

Prophet is a blast

A thrilling dystopian novel

**Bold, brilliant. Prophet is hypnotically enthralling**, frightening, fearless, funny and full of heart. I loved it

Books by Helen Macdonald

Articles featuring Helen Macdonald

What to read if you loved Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

The best books that explore how nature benefits our mental health

The best books for nature lovers

The best memoirs of all time, as chosen by our readers

Books to transport you to different places and times

8 empowering books about living through loss

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