This is perhaps the most curious and beautiful book upon the subject of grief that I have ever encountered. For Helen Mcdonald, the death of her father leads back to a youthful obsession with falconry, and so she decides - basically upon a whim - to procure and train a goshawk. Not a nice little peregrine, as she has done before, nor an eagle, but a goshawk. Huge, brutal, temperamental. A psychopath with wings (or so the books all tell her). 
 The experience hinges on the use (conscious or accidental) of this relationship between hawk and falconer as therapeutic. Taming the hawk, bringing it closer to the human world, becomes a way of exerting power and control over the forces of nature, but in growing closer to the hawk, the falconer is also offered an escape into the wilderness, into the simple world of the hunt. For the broken and the grief-stricken, it is all too alluring. 
 Mcdonald contrasts much of what she does with the life of author T.H. White, who endeavoured to train a bird of his own (documented in his "The Goshawk"), though for very different reasons and with rather more varied success. The book weaves autobiography, biography, falconry and nature writing in a gorgeous and engaging style. It is hard to imagine reading this book and being quite the same afterwards. 
 That's probably very woolly. I'll try again: Deeply moving, beautifully written, utterly striking. Go read.