... [Macdonald's] work is an antidote to so much romantic, reductive writing about the natural world as pristine, secret, uninhabited—as a convenient blank canvas for the hero’s journey of self-discovery.

No longer confined to a single grief or creature, Macdonald’s fascination with the natural world ranges from the habits of cuckoos and glowworms to the biodiversity of trees. A lament for the loss of natural habitats ('the world’s sixth great extinction') is inevitable here, but overall Vesper Flights is both more celebratory and more subtly conflicted than her earlier book.

...dazzling.

...[a] radiant new essay collection.

A former historian of science, Macdonald is as captivated by the everyday (ants, bird’s nests) as she is by the extraordinary (glowworms, total solar eclipses), and her writing often closes the distance between the two.

This poignant essay collection is the perfect mediator to join our hands with nature once again. Macdonald makes it clear in her work that nature is her ultimate teacher. Her humility in the face of the vastness of the world around us is one of the many things that makes her so likeable. When you sit down with a Helen Macdonald book, you can trust that there will be no ego and no lecture. Though her voice is clear and her presence is deeply felt, the author is happy to give up her starring role in her own book, letting the natural world shine. By doing so, readers can step more completely into Macdonald’s shoes. It’s clear to see, in her life as much as in this book, that nature leads. Alas, not every essay in the collection is equal in power, and the titular essay seems misplaced at the midway point—an essay that completely summarizes the spirit of the collection demands its rightful place at the front. But the raw emotion that Macdonald brought to H Is for Hawk, giving the book its electricity, is all over Vesper Flights.

Macdonald is a glorious writer.

Helen Macdonald’s series of studies is very much a sipper rather than a glugger. Read individually, they show a remarkable eloquence, intelligence and empathy; but read sequentially too often and the same concerns, the same phrases spring up.

... a rich assortment of strange and beautiful wonders to reflect on, learn from, and marvel at. The essays are personal accounts involving observation, recollection and, above all, fascination.

... a stunning book that urges us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world, and fight to preserve it.

This is not the follow-up to Helen Macdonald’s breakthrough book, H Is for Hawk and in that sense it may disappoint some of her readers. But it needn’t: in fact, as a selection of Macdonald’s journalism and essays, it provides a series of short blasts of insightful, invigorating nature writing.

... fragments of autobiography mix with impressionistic snapshots and deeper observations that peel away our anthropomorphic preconceptions and reveal the intelligence and mystery of birds and other creatures.

... combines memoir, natural history, and literary biography to create something wild, messy, immensely personal, and intensely readable.

... an excellent collection.

Macdonald mines a rich seam of scientific research and field observation, and the essays are packed with detail.

Readers of Macdonald’s wonderful memoir H is for Hawk will have high expectations for Vesper Flights. Not to worry: While the essays don’t have the memoir’s concentration on a single grief-fueled story, they do showcase the same feel for the interplay of wild and human worlds.

... a bravura performance, displaying Macdonald’s literary gifts: her curiosity, her intensity of attention. And her pleasure of her prose — clear, tart, understated but regularly exploding into brilliance.

... there is, in each of these essays, a clear sense of the sensibility that is doing the looking: patient, alert, learned and excitable.

The poet in Macdonald moves these subjects toward mystery.

One of the great pleasures in this collection of pieces is seeing how determinedly [Macdonald] picks away at conundrums first encountered in H Is for Hawk, her hugely successful memoir of 2014.

Macdonald’s is a voice of introspection that seems fully suited to the global grief.

The 41 essays in Vesper Flights continue her explorations into the more-than-human world. Whether viewing feral pigs, taking her niece on a walk through a rewilded fen, or tracking deer along the edge of a motorway, Macdonald works hard to break us humans out of our species solipsism.

Some of her most compelling stories explore 'the strange collisions and collusions' between natural history and British national history.

... gorgeously composed, complexly affecting, and stunningly revelatory. Macdonald is both exacting and enthralled as she describes glowworms, hares, ants, swans, migrating birds seen at night from the top of the Empire State Building, the paradoxes of nature reserves, tree disease, storms, the lessons in denial and prediction embedded in migraines, how wild mushrooms signal a hidden larger whole, and the shock felt by every living entity during a total solar eclipse.

English naturalist Macdonald...offers meditations on the natural world and its inhabitants in an inviting collection of 41 new and previously published essays that are infused with wonder, nostalgia, and melancholy.

There are some particularly wonderful moments in this altogether memorable collection.