Helen Macdonald could charm the birds out of the trees

When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes, she would imagine and count through the layers of the earth that lay beneath her, and then the layers of atmosphere above her. ‘It had something of the power of incantation,’ she writes in Vesper Flights, an essay originally published in the New York Times Magazine and now the title piece in this new collection of essays. Much like her previous book H Is for Hawk, this volume sees Macdonald weave together personal reflections, natural and human histories and fragments of autobiography to create nature writing that is at once intimate and expansive.

Some of the essays in Vesper Flights take Macdonald to extraordinary places. ‘In Her Orbit’ sees her journey to the Andes to write about a SETI scientist who is searching for clues about life on Mars, billions of years ago, by studying extreme habitats here on Earth.