H Is for Hawk

After her father died suddenly on a London street, Helen Macdonald, a falconer of many years, bought Mabel, a young goshawk, though she had never before felt drawn to train one. The memoir follows the year she spent taming the hawk while grieving, and how the bird's fierce temper came to mirror her own. For guidance she turns to The Goshawk, a chronicle by T. H. White, author of The Once and Future King. Alisdair Macdonald, the father she lost, had been a well regarded photojournalist. It took the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year award, and a film version premiered in 2025.

Barack Obama included it on his 2016 summer vacation reading list, and former Westpac chief executive Gail Kelly named it in a roundup of what CEOs are reading.