Another beautiful book by the author of Hawks.An ode to nature essays that bring us out of our home to the outside world with all its beauty.#netgalley#grove atlantic

I loved Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk” so I was excited to see she had a new book, and happy to say that “Vesper Flights” is another great read. This collection of essays, some previously published but all new to me, covers all sorts of topics, from mushrooms to migraines and swans to skyscrapers, all written in Macdonald’s gorgeous prose. Take, for example, her description of a nature walk in England’s Wicken Fen: “As we crossed one of the fen’s ancient waterways, a barn owl floated past us, mothy wings shining through particulate mist; at our feet a drinker moth caterpillar inched furrily across the path like a cautiously mobile moustache.” Or this passage: “The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear, unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks.” Or her description of “that hot week in Gloucestershire in the 1990s when thunderstorms came every evening so the air turned sepia at six and before the first drops of storm rain sent pollen dust up in puffs from the skylight I’d open the windows and wait for thunder while little owls called through the thick air, and in the morning tiny white dots of storm-blown blossom covered the house with wet French lace.” The beauty of these passages is palpable, yet so too is the problem of climate change, which hangs over this collection like that coming storm—she calls it “the storm as expectation. As solution about to be offered. Or all hell about to break loose.... I can’t help but think that this is the weather we are all now made of. All of us waiting. Waiting for news.... Waiting for hope, stranded in that strange light that stills our hearts before the storm of history.” Reading “Vesper Flights” at the beginning of March 2020 was, for me, like being “stranded in that strange light”—a beautiful place to have spent time in before the storm that these essays foreshadowed hit.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review. Recommended.

If you're worried that essays won't deliver the impact of H IS FOR HAWK...stop worrying. Each of these essays is rich with Helen Macdonald's hallmark love of nature, wonderfully thoughtful and incisive observations and a care for the world we live in which will illuminate a reader's days.

Fascinating collection of essays by Helen Macdonald on nature, our relationship to animals, their impact on us. This is a treasure trove of insightful texts for all nature lovers. You sense Macdonald's passion for nature on every page.

Well written essays about the natural world, our place in it, and the love Helen Macdonald feels for all creatures. Every bit as wonderful as H is for Hawk. A treasure to read.

After a hit non-fiction book, a collection of shorter pieces can often feel like a disappointing stopgap, a quick cash-in bunging together a load of reviews &c that didn't necessarily need a second run in book form. But just as H Is For Hawk was a whole different order of being to most of the 'personal journey into niche hobby/history' books it ostensibly resembles, so these new and selected essays add up to something utterly substantial. Many of the topics are as you'd expect - birds, land management, climate change. Others are less so - migraines, astrobiology. But all of them tie in to the same concerns about our relationship with the world around us, the way the barriers we erect harm the enclosed as well as the excluded. Mirroring this, there was a formatting error in the Netgalley ARC, where the pieces would just run into each other, sometimes without a paragraph break let alone a title, and so instead of following signposted routes I had instead to tread watchfully through the wild, alert to sudden switchbacks. Though of course, that didn't always mean a new essay had begun, as when Zhou Enlai popped into a scene of swan upping on the Thames and turned out to belong there. But this mirrors the phenomenon to which Macdonald keeps circling back, where migrating birds don't give a hoot about the borders beneath them, where animals don't share our clear distinction between their space and our space. Indeed, sometimes the boundary between them and us comes to feel a wholly false distinction – I wouldn't say it was my favourite piece here, because the book is full of short essays holding gorgeous sentences and huge epiphanies, but certainly the closest bit to H Is For Hawk is when she talks about Maxwell Knight and his cuckoo. He was, of course, the spymaster who inspired Bond's M (and it's at once perfect and an inconceivable crossing of streams that he also worked with the model for le Carré's Smiley), so to have entered a later phase as an avuncular naturalist, but then written a book about rearing that of all birds...well, between that and TH White's goshawk, one could almost believe in Pullman's daemons. A few times she talks about certain animals – deer, swifts – always seeming like visitors from some other world, whose presence is at once arresting and a blessing. I think I feel a little the same way about Helen Macdonald herself.

The author of H is for Hawk returns with this tribute to the natural world with a collection of essays. From the loss of habitats for so many species to the adaptations many of those same animals have made to live in the most inhospitable places, this is a sobering and timely read about the nature of our planet and the threshold we are poised upon