The cover of Helen Jukes’s beekeeping memoir, A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings, bears an endorsement from Helen Macdonald, the author responsible more than anyone for the resurgence of British nature writing over the past decade. Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk established something new – the use of nature as the dominant vehicle for our autopathography. The nature-cure narrative replaced the misery memoir as the principal medium through which we communicated our discontents, and it felt like the bookshops were suddenly full of books charting recoveries – whether by tending tulips or watching wolves – that stepped closely in the footsteps of Macdonald’s. Very few of them attained anything like the radiant achievement of H Is for Hawk and, reading the blurb for Jukes’s strangely titled book – a millennial takes up beekeeping to compensate for the shiftlessness of modern life and a boring desk job – I couldn’t help but experience a little sinking at the familiarity of the set-up.
It’s a feeling that Macdonald must know well – I imagine she is sent every one of these books as they appear – and it’s striking that one of the words she reaches for to praise Jukes is “unexpected”. A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is indeed a surprising book, even an astonishing one, overcoming all those initial concerns in its luminously honest and affecting first chapter. Jukes is a gloriously gifted writer and her book ought to become a key text of this bright moment in our history of nature writing. I was reminded of William Fiennes’s The Snow Geese and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, but these resonances should not obscure the uniqueness of a book that quietly, beautifully, rewired my heart as I read it.
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