When Helen’s beloved father passes away, she is knocked sideways by grief and loses herself in memories of their time birding and exploring the natural world together. She becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk, and so she brings the fearsome bird Mabel home to her life as a graduate fellow at Cambridge.
Helen fills the freezer with hawk food and turns off her phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. But as she labours to tame Mabel, a grieving Helen undergoes an untaming of her own.
An affecting record of a spiritual journey, H is for Hawk is an authentic story about memory and finding solace within the beauty of nature. A stirring testimony as to how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love, Philippa Lowthorpe’s sensitive biographical drama is driven with heart by its wonderful supporting cast, including the extraordinary Brendan Gleeson and Lindsay Duncan.