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Not many books about the human relationship with animals end well.... Watership Down,聽Charlotte鈥檚 Web, A Kestrel For a Knave - famously adapted into the film Kes.
And of course there was the police drama tragedy Who Framed Rodger Rabbit?
And whilst I thought this non-fiction memoir might follow the same tragic path, H is For Hawk took me by surprise.
It is written beautifully, with a dense lyricism that took me to far off places.
I knew nothing of birds, not to mention the training of birds of prey, before I read this relatively short novel and I'll be honest, I wasn't too thrilled at the prospect.
How wrong I was.
Helen MacDonald has lost her father suddenly, the man she looked up to.
The man she had by her side all her life was gone, her job is coming to an end signalling another forced loss, the loss of her home.
As she starts falling into a depression and as her desire for human contact lessens, she makes the decision to fulfil a childhood obsession and buys a goshawk (that, as a nice side note, was bred in Northern Ireland) to train.
TH White is a 1930's English author, struggling to come to terms with his sexuality in a hostile environment. He too is a falconer (though not a particularly successful one) and the story of his eccentricity is interwoven with Helen's, as we share in the developing relationship between Helen and her goshawk Mable.
From the moment they first meet to the seasonal changes, the games and bizarrely the shared聽space of a living room, we gain an understanding and, I think it's fair to say, affection for both Mable and her trainer.
I thought this was an odd, beautifully written book, a comforting book and like a metaphorical hug, a real 'Sunday by the fire' book, with its perfect descriptions of the Cambridge countryside.
It is much more than a nature book. It brought me to life, it enveloped me in sadness and an almost unbearable grief from which I, the reader, thankfully, triumphantly flew back to the human world where 'human hands hold human hands' just in the nick of time.
Some books make you envious of talent, the author's ability to craft words as they do... H is for Hawk is such a book.
It's so vivid, so utterly compelling it's hard to imagine it will do anything other than become a literary classic.
This is the 7th book by Helen MacDonald who is a fellow of Cambridge University who now lives in聽Suffolk.