Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Vintage, £8.99)

One day Helen Macdonald learns that her father has died. It knocks her sideways — for ages. “It happens to everyone,” she writes, “but you feel it alone.” So Macdonald gets a hawk. That’s her answer. She wants a goshawk — possibly the most savage bird of prey there is. “I’d never seen anything of myself reflected in their solitudinous, murderous eyes,” she writes. “But the world had changed, and so had I.” Macdonald gets the creature. It entrances her. This is her story of their relationship.

Nora Webster by Cólm Toibín (Penguin, £7.99)

Nora Webster lives in a small town in the south of Ireland. Her husband Maurice recently died in agony in a hospital. Was the doctor somehow to blame? During the period of Maurice’s decline Nora’s two sons stayed with her aunt. One of the sons has developed a stammer, and there is bad blood between Nora and the aunt. This is an exquisite novel about the life of a widow. It’s excruciating and totally compelling. There’s a lot of nuanced signalling going on. Tóibín is brilliant on small-time snobbery. He controls it all with absolute mastery.

Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark (Penguin, £9.99)

When he was a schoolboy Max Tegmark was nearly knocked down by a truck. If it had hit him, he thinks, he would have died. That’s because the truck was a large, moving object made of solid steel. But then again this is weird because “solid steel is really mostly empty space”. Tegmark is a physics professor at MIT. He speculates wildly. Perhaps he did die after all in a parallel universe? Well, why not? Tegmark gets to grips with the big questions: infinity, the concept of time, and the idea that things can be in two places at once. Bracing and lively.