Vesper Flights
Helen Macdonald
£10.99
Mr B's review
This book is a collection of essays inspired by Helen’s experiences with the natural world. She describes the book as a “cabinet of curiosities”, not just describing wildlife, but looking at our human interactions with wildlife and natural phenomena.
Helen writes about how we romanticise and anthropomorphise animals, how we treat migrants, the way we hold nature in isolation in reserves and how our bright cities attract and endanger high flying birds.
It was a joy to be reminded of my own awe: waiting for summer storms, seeing glow worms, watching vesper flights (swifts at dusk), feeling the air shift from a murmuration of starlings and befriending animals.
Through the patterns and behaviours of the natural world, Helen looks both at herself and the rest of us. Both personal and questioning, I found this book very thought provoking. – Katrina
Description
**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**
‘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.
From the bestselling author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world.
Helen Macdonald brings 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. A perfect read for anyone looking for renewed appreciation for the natural world.
‘Helen Macdonald is one of the best nature writers now working’ The Telegraph
Publisher Review
Thrilling dispatches from a vanishing world… A powerful – and entertaining – corrective to the idea that the only hopes that matter on this planet are those of our own species. — Tim Adams * Observer * Vesper Flights is a book of ideas and urgent, beautiful writing… [Macdonald] is a writer whose every word is to be cherished. — Tom Lathan * Spectator * Helen Macdonald is one of the best nature writers now working. — Simon Ings * Telegraph *Books of the Year* * Nature writing at its best… All kinds of wondrous… 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* * An antidote to so much romantic, reductive writing about the natural world… Macdonald’s writing teems with other voices and perspectives, with her own challenges to herself. It muddies any facile ideas about nature and the human, and prods at how we pleat our prejudices, politics and desires into our notions of the animal world… Hers is a gritty, companionable intimacy with the wild… The essays…are short, varied and highly edible. — Parul Sehgal * New York Times *
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