In this award-winning memoir, author Helen Macdonald recounts the grief-stricken year they spent training a young goshawk, Mabel, after the unexpected death of their father, photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald.

Can the wildness within us be tamed?

Helen Macdonald grew up training birds of prey, but it wasn't until the sudden death of their father, which pushed them into an almost-feral state of grief, that they fixed on the idea of training a goshawk — a bird traditionally considered murderous and difficult by falconers.

In their 2014 memoir, H is for Hawk, Macdonald describes their turbulent year training the young goshawk Mabel.

Macdonald interweaves their memoir with a biographical account of T. H. White, a figure they find both troubling and sympathetic.

White is best known as the author of popular Arthurian novels, but he also wrote The Goshawk, an account of his own struggles to train a hawk.