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Helen Macdonald determined to become a falconer as a child. She learned an entire vocabulary of falconry and read all the classic falconry books. In 2007, when she was deeply in grief due to the sudden death of her father, Helen came up with the idea of ​​​​taming her own goshawk to get rid of her grief. She bought Mabel on the dockside in Scotland, took her back to her home in Cambridge, and began a long and bizarre journey: training the most unruly goshawk in the animal world. The author turns his longing for his father and his love for falcons into words, and tells with great sincerity the arduous journey of taming the goshawk and rescuing himself from the grief of losing a loved one. Helen's story of taming the most ferocious birds of prey quickly captured the hearts of millions of readers around the world. Mabel is fierce and unruly, like a mirror reflecting Helen's sadness after losing her father. Together, the two of them, raptor and human, "explore the pain and beauty of being alive." "Helen's Goshawk" is about how to reconcile death, life and love. It combines memory, nature, humanities, biography and history. It is a strange book that is difficult to classify, written by a unique and outstanding author. Once published, the book immediately appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and became a sensation. It frequently appeared in other major lists and was well received by the media. It was also named the Samuel Johnson Award for Best Biography and the Costa Book Award for the British Cross-Genre Book of the Year.

In Taking Off at Dusk, Helen Macdonald brings together her most popular essays, as well as new ones, on topics such as nostalgia for a lost countryside, the ordeal of raising ostriches, and her own private evening prayers as she tried to fall asleep. Meditating on concepts of captivity and freedom, migration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds migrating through Tribute of Light from the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, searching for the last orioles in Suffolk's aspen groves. She writes with clarity about wild boars, swifts, mushroom foraging, migraines, the oddities of bird's nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find in observing wildlife. One of the century's most important and insightful nature writers, this is a fascinating and important book about observation, obsession, time, memory, love and loss, and how we make sense of the world around us.