Nature books for autumn nights
Nick Barley
Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald VINTAGE
I can’t think of another nature book that carries such emotional complexity. As much as this is a riveting account of how one woman trained a mighty goshawk, it’s also Macdonald’s heartrending memoir about the oceanic grief she felt after her father suddenly died – and how spending time with Mabel the bird offered her a path towards emotional recovery.
Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie SORT OF BOOKS
In Jamie’s exquisite prose-poetry, ‘the past can spill out of the earth, become the present’, and pressed flowers from a student voyage are ‘still there,, Jamie masterfully plots a route through her own memories – and the artefacts of entire communities that unexpectedly rise to the surface in a warming world.
