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Vesper Flights

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Vesper Flights

By: Helen Macdonald
Narrated by: Helen Macdonald
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Animals don’t exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.

From the internationally acclaimed author of H Is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee’s flight to the UK.

Her pieces range from accounts of swan upping on the Thames to watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary to seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, what we do when we watch wildlife and why.

This is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us, by one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers.

©2020 Helen Macdonald (P)2020 Penguin Audio Animals Biological Sciences Botany & Plants Outdoors & Nature Science

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A superb, deeply felt and immensely thought provoking series of essays. Helen MacDonald never labours her point, but I felt despair at times at what human beings have done to the planet. There are fortunately also moments of joyous beauty. Clear eyed, she writes clear prose, her own humanity a hopeful example.

Vesper Flights

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Amazingly it is six years since Helen Macdonald's incredible memoir H is for Hawk was published and this is her first book since. H is for Hawk certainly had an impact on me when I first read it and that impact has been sustained, such is its power.

Vesper Flights is in a similar style and contains a selection of nature themed essays inter twined with the aspects of the author's own life. We discover how you can actually hear the sounds of a chick in an egg, stories of flocking birds, refugees, ants, migraines and foraging for mushrooms. I loved the story of "up-swanning" and the analogy to the Brexit debate and the incredible imaginary in the piece on glow worms and the wonder of the re-emergence of horn finches in England.

This is wonderful writing and I loved it. 5 stars.

Whimsical essays on nature

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I adored this book. it really spoke to me. It's not completely easy or comfortable there is graphic animal injury and death, discussion of human rights abuses and trauma but it left my heart feeling light and my head feeling open. Wonderful to have listened to.

beautiful and detailed and fantastic

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I appreciated the book but I have to admit that I didn’t take to the author’s narration, which I found mannered. I see that others did like it, however, so this may be a question of taste. This will be an author that I read in the future rather than listen to.

Thoughtful book

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It is especially excellent that she natlrrates her own books. As a narrator, she is able express exactly the emotion she intented when writing the essays, and it comes through so clearly I always cry at various points in her books. Favourite author ever

Helen Macdonald is excellent as ever

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Really enjoyed this book, small stories that make you think and question your life and work life balance.

lovely group of thought provoking small stories

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Have not enjoyed this as much as her first book at all. But I did read that one rather than listen. I can’t say strongly enough how much the narrator, to me anyway, has the wrong intonation and it grated throughout for me and totally spoilt the story - pushed myself to finish it

Narrator !

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just not for me this one, started first story but it was so uninteresting I had to move to next story, it was much the same.

stories are mind numbing

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