H Is for Hawk, as you will perhaps have worked out by now, tells the story of how one woman deals with grief by training a goshawk.

She is able to accommodate change – perhaps even to find succour in it – and we may breathe a sigh of relief. Mabel's cold gaze at the aviary's cinderblock walls might well induce her to flinch inwardly – I'll miss you, she thinks, even if you won't miss me – but there is calm and quiet buoyancy in her prediction that the bird's ochre feathers will soon be 'barred stone-grey and white'. But the reader knows by this point that Macdonald will be able to bear the weeks ahead, that she is restored to herself and to those who care about her. Their peculiar intimacy is temporarily at an end the next time they meet, they will be strangers again. For Macdonald, this is a painful parting. Macdonald's H Is for Hawk turns all this on its head, beginning as it does with a death – and a human one at that – and ending with a flare of optimism as her goshawk, Mabel, is safely installed in the aviary where she will spend the moulting season. All the same, the reader must come to terms with the loss of Woundwort, who is savaged by dogs, his body never found. Richard Adams's Watership Down is, in its sappy, mystical way, a little more hopeful.

A s Helen Macdonald notes, animal books rarely end happily: Henry Williamson's Tarka is killed by hounds, and the otter in Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water is beaten to death by a man with a mallet the deer in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling is shot.

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