Finally, it's a literary biography of T.H. It's also the love story of a woman and her raptor – Marley and Me with razor-sharp talons and a bouquet of dead pheasants. On the surface, it's a chronicle of sorrow – the moment in every child's life when 'you have to renegotiate your place in the world' and the experience of a daughter trying to find her way in the world without the man she considered 'one of best friends.' It is a manual on falconry, too, a not-quite-step-by-step guide to caring for and training a bird of prey. H is for Hawk is the book borne out of the 'absorbing and dark and beautiful experience,' as she describes the period following her father's passing. 'I picked a very strange way of coping with grief,' she says. She did the only sensible thing she could think of and bought a hawk. Nothing made sense any more and she feared she might be going crazy. She bought and read books 'on grieving, on loss and bereavement' that 'spilled over desk in tottering piles.' She was 37 years old, without a partner or children or a nine-to-five job to tether her to the world she risked floating away. I stared at the sun going down and the sun coming up, and the sun in between.' The days passed. 'I didn't sleep,' she writes in a newly published memoir of the months that followed. His daughter, Helen, was devastated by the photojournalist's sudden death – a heart attack – and, after the funeral, retreated to her home in Cambridge, England, to mourn. Alisdair Macdonald died in 2007 at the age of 67.

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