From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes a transcendent collection of essays about the natural world
'Thrilling dispatches from a vanishing world' Observer
Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.
Helen Macdonaldbrings together a collection of her best-loved writing along with new pieces covering a thrilling range of subjects. There are essays here on headaches, on catching swans, on hunting mushrooms, on twentieth-century spies, on numinous experiences and high-rise buildings; on nests and wild pigs and the tribulations of farming ostriches.
Vesper Flights is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, it confirms Helen Macdonald as one of this century's greatest nature writers.
Chosen as a Sunday Times Book to Watch Out for in 2020 and a New Statesman Book to Read in 2020
About the Author
Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, naturalist and historian of science. Her book H is for Hawk won many prizes, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Costa Book of the Year, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France, and in the US was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and lives in Suffolk.
Industry Reviews
"Nature writing at its best... Helen Macdonald's eagerly awaited first book since H is for Hawk in 2014 is...all kinds of wondrous... I wanted to savour it, spinning it out across weeks, one chapter per evening, like a sort of lockdown Forty and One Nights of my own... Each and every essay reminded me what a gifted writer Macdonald is. Her prose is poetry but it also has a drenching kind of a clarity. And this is good because we shouldn't allow ourselves to be lulled by the sheer pleasure of reading her. For these are urgent pieces designed to open our eyes."
Caroline Sanderson, Bookseller Book of the Month
"The author of the deeply moving book H is for Hawkreturns this month with Vesper Flights, a collection of essays about the relationship between humans and nature. Regarded as one of this century's greatest nature writers, Helen Macdonald takes simple moments - of nesting birds, wild boars emerging from the woods, foraging for mushrooms on an autumn day - and weaves them with history, personal reflection and political comment."
Amy Barrett, BBC Science Focus Magazin
"[Macdonald's] prose is poetic but it also has a drenching clarity... These are urgent pieces designed to open our eyes to the parlous state of the environment... Vesper Flights is a vital book for now because it...shows us that in respecting this diversity lies both the joy and unity of our own species."
Charlotte Heathcote, Sunday Express
"H is for Hawk turned many a reader into a goshawk fan... This lyrical essay collection also explores human relationships with the natural world, but has a wider scope, taking in a search for the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests and swan-upping on the Thames."
Country Living
