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Reading lists

What to read if you loved Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

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15 Vintage stories of hope, in time for Christmas

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Features

The best books that explore how nature benefits our mental health

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The books that got us reading differently

We are living in a golden age of nature writing, and books about the great outdoors are flourishing. 

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The best books for nature lovers

Books to transport us to other lands and places

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Books to transport you to different places and times

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Stephen Grosz and Helen Macdonald on finding headspace and comfort books

Vesper Flights

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

**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

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.

Vintage Minis

Recovery

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

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.

A BBC2 Between the Covers pick

H is for Hawk

The Sunday Times bestseller and Costa and Samuel Johnson Prize Winner

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

**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 number one bestselling phenomenon that is a powerful and profound mediation on grief expressed through the trials of training a goshawk. 
 
**WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR** 
** WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION** 
 
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. 
 
**SELECTED BY CARIAD LLOYD ON BBC TWO'S BETWEEN THE COVERS** 
 
'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

It just sings. I couldn’t stop reading.

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.

H is for Hawk is a dazzling piece of work: deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence… The result is a deeply human work shot through…with intelligence and compassion… I will be surprised if a better book than H is for Hawk is published this year.

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.

[Macdonald’s] descriptive writing, startlingly and devilishly precise…is only the half of it. She has written her taming of Mabel like a thriller, slowly and carefully cranking the tension is that your stomach and heart leap queasily towards each other… Captivates.

Captivating… There is a highly polished brilliance to her writing. The English-speaking world has an old passion for books about creatures and captivating companions … Helen Macdonald looks set to revive the genre.

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

It is a mark of Macdonald’s achievement that so exultant a book can resolve itself in a sense of failure, yet leave the reader as uplifted as a raptor riding on a thermal.

MacDonald’s prose is poetic, forensic, yet often capable of quickening the pulse. Her lexicon…is vivid and joyous, soaring as freely as birds do.

One of the most eloquent accounts of bereavement you could hope to read… A grief memoir with wings.

What she has achieved is a very rare thing in literature - a completely realistic account of a human relationship with animal consciousness… It is a soaring performance and Mabel is the star.

Cunningly plaited and – almost – devastating… It deserves to sell shedloads and win prizes, it is naturalist writing of that spectacular quality that is literature too.

A wondrous book of loss and recovery… When [Macdonald] matches her factual know-how…with her poet’s eye, it is excellent… An exceptional book of twisted growth.

Absorbing…  This memoir is lit with flashes of that grace, a grace that sweeps down to the reader to hold her wrist tight with beautiful, terrible class. The discovery of the season.

People talk about books that change your life. I loved the fact that this book does something much more valuable. It doesn’t change anything. It leaves everything just where it was, only more so; more distinct, more itself. It opens your eyes. And it deepens what we have always known; that we live side by side with each other, as we do with the creatures around us.

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

Mesmerising, decisive and devastating… Her description of Mabel in flight should be etched into every birdwatcher's field guide... Macdonald is a nature writer supreme, arguably the best practitioner of this art form writing today.

Strange yet compelling... Macdonald’s poetic prose soars… An uplifting message that…sends the heart soaring.

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

We can’t recommend this strange, clever, beautiful book highly enough.

A soliloquy that sings from the pages. Truly beautiful.

In fifty years time – a hundred – H is for Hawk will still defy easy definition. Readers will see wildness a little differently and they will still finish with a silent cheer for a fellow human starting to re-engage with the world. File under classic.

Poetic, imaginative and richly persuasive prose.   Macdonald’s sensitivity to English weather, landscape and natural habitat is extraordinary; she is a word-painter of the subtlest palette and an audio recorder of peerless quality.

Extraordinary… A searing study of bereavement and a meditation on man’s place in the natural world… Written with vigour, leavened with humour, it doesn’t just sing, it flies.

Very rarely does a book reach out to its readers in such an immediate and engaging manner… A page-turning saga full of profound reflection… A truly remarkable achievement… This book transcends nature writing. Its quality of distinction is apparent before any exercise of critical faculty.

Macdonald is her father’s daughter; she takes photographs, but with words, brilliant ones. H is for Helen… G is for good.

Strange and beautiful… An incredible achievement.

It is in her descriptions of nature that Macdonald really excels… And…it’s the hawks themselves…which really come alive.

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.

Helen’s skill is to cover so much beneath the camouflage of ‘nature writing’ – with perceptive, far-reaching and rather beautiful results.

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.

You won’t find a better nature book this year.

This part-memoir, part-history, part-nature combination could have gone dreadfully wrong but it doesn’t. In fact, like Mabel, it flies.

Somehow the book had rattled me so much that, even after finishing it, I couldn’t let it go.

Helen Macdonald’s book is a worthy and unusual winner; it’s part grief-memoir, part history of falconry.

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

Macdonald’s unusual approach and her resonant natural descriptions make it an outstanding book.

H is for Hawk…is the most “A for Amazing” book I've read in a long while.

The deserved winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, this is one of the most original works you’ll read this year.

The passion and conviction with which Macdonald tells an extraordinary story transcends any fear that this will be another “nature story”. Instead it is fascinating, moving and gripping throughout.

Winner of 2014’s Samuel Johnson prize, this is a captivating nature book as well as a moving elegy on love and life.

The book is almost faultless in its exploration of the relationship with one’s own consciousness as well as that of an animal.

I’ve never read anything like it before… The last lines brought tears to my eyes.

I must agree with the judges of the Samuel Johnson prize. Helen Macdonald’s incredible H Is for Hawk…is a truly original mixture… It is, as the flyleaf predicts, destined to become a classic of nature writing.

H is for Hawk is an extraordinary achievement – and a salutary reminder that animals are not symbols, but co-tenants of our living landscape.

Helen Macdonald’s prose streams on to the page with absolute clarity in this extraordinary book.

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.

Combining nature writing of the highest order…with a deeply affecting meditation on bereavement, this looks set to become a classic.

One of the most all-consumingly wonderful books I’ve read in ages.

I’ve read excerpts from this book and it sounds wild and strange and haunting.

It’s worthy winner most in that it shows how diverse non-fiction can be in itself.

It’s a treat – a truly original, if slightly mad, book.

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.

To categorize this work as merely memoir, nature writing or spiritual writing would understate [Macdonald’s] achievement

Captivating and beautifully written, it’s a meditation on the bond between beasts and humans and the pain and beauty of being alive

To come across writing this good…is like spotting a swooping bird of prey on a woodland walk; it’s unexpected and thrilling, and the experience stays with you

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

Macdonald’s nature writing is truly breathtaking… H is for Hawk is a work that beautifully explores the natural in the midst of the very personal

probably one of the most unusual non-fictions books I’ve read, but… one of the most heartfelt and intriguing ones

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.

Exceptionally well researched and written… It’s a wonderful book, it made me cry.

Macdonald's is a book about grief, the churlish indifference of the natural world to human emotions and the solitude of failure, but it is also about a "return from this strange hedgerow ontology to more ordinary humanity". It is heartbreaking and affirming at the same time.

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

Martin Chilton, Olivia Petter and Ceri Radford

One of the decade’s most arresting nature books

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation

Falcon And The Hawk, The

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 (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

Sin Blaché

'Fabulous...a page-turner' Neil Gaiman

YOUR HAPPIEST MEMORY IS THEIR DEADLIEST WEAPON. 
 
‘Fabulous... Present-day science fiction that feels like the best sort of spy novel’ 
NEIL GAIMAN, author of Coraline 
 
This is Prophet. It knows when you were happiest. It gives life to your fondest memories and uses them to destroy you... 
 
An all-American diner appears overnight in a remote British field. And the deaths quickly follow. A weapon like no other - Prophet - is targeting innocent people. But nobody knows who created it, or why. 
 
Sunil Rao seems a surprising choice of investigator. Chaotic and unpredictable, the former agent is the antithesis of his partner Lieutenant Colonel Adam Rubenstein, the model of a military man. But Sunil has the unique ability to distinguish truth from lies in objects, words and people, in the past and in real time. And Adam is the only one who truly knows him, after a troubled past together. Now, as they battle this strange new reality, they are drawn closer than ever to defend what they both hold most dear. 
 
Prophet can weaponise the past. But only love will protect the future. 
 
‘Prophet is a blast’ 
SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘A thrilling dystopian novel’ 
TIME 
 
***A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR***

Helen Macdonald

Prophet

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