This absorbing book opens in the Cambridgeshire fens. "It's a land of twisted pine trees, burned-out cars, shotgun-peppered road signs and us Air Force bases," Helen Macdonald writes. She left home at dawn in her old Volkswagen on an errand she can barely name until she finds what she is looking for: a pair of goshawks on the wing, "raincloud grey", slipping through the air "fast, like a knife-cut", male and female dancing together in the morning air. Three weeks later she learns of her father's death; the story she tells is spurred by grief. Grief of many kinds, not just for the loss of a loved one. This is a well-wrought book, one part memoir, one part gorgeous evocation of the natural world and one part literary meditation on the difficult legacy of T.H. White-English author, most famously, of a great Arthurian fantasy, "The Once and Future King". In the first book in that sequence, "The Sword in the Stone", the magician, Merlyn, changes his young charge, Wart (really Arthur), for a time into a hawk.
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