A hawk and a dead father.

Three books plaited together: a woman losing her father, a woman training a goshawk, and the strange broken life of T. H. White, who wrote The Sword in the Stone and who tried to train a hawk himself and made an appalling job of it.

The hawk is called Mabel and she is the most vividly real animal I've met on a page. Not cuddly. Not a symbol — or not only a symbol. A thing of pure wildness with a hooked face and enormous yellow feet and a heartbeat, and the writing about her is so precise that you can smell the mews and feel the jesses between your fingers.

What it is really about is what grief does to a person. She goes out into the fields and lets herself turn half hawk, because a hawk does not mourn and does not remember, and for a while she is not quite a person any more, and the book is completely honest about how far out she went. That took courage to write down.

The White chapters are where some readers get off the bus. I did not. I found him unbearably sad, this lonely frightened violent man taking it all out on a bird, and the way she keeps holding him up against herself is the cleverest piece of structure in the book.

Nine. It made me want to go outside, and books hardly ever do that.