Vesper Flights

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

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**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

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.
Tim Adams, Observer

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.
Parul Sehgal, New York Times

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.
New Statesman

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.
Teddy Jamieson, Herald Scotland

About Helen Macdonald

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.

Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 05/08/2021
ISBN: 9780099575467
Length: 272 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 17mm x 129mm
Weight: 191g
Price: £10.99

All editions

Vesper Flights

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

Format:

Buy the book from:

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.

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.

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

About Helen Macdonald

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