Barrington acquired UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights from Marianne Gunn O’Connor in a five-way auction, with publication scheduled for 2027.

Barrington said Adam White “brings nature writing to a new place” with the book, adding: “I am enormously proud to have the chance to publish it."

White said: “I began 2025 with no greater ambition than to get this manuscript over the line after half a decade of writing and rewriting, second-guesses and breakthroughs. By the end of the year, thanks to my incredible agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor, this crazy dream about a city, its people and its raptors was fielding a level of interest I never imagined.

“I’m overjoyed City of Hawks has found a perch on the Penguin family tree. It links it to some of my favourite books and affords the opportunity to work with Brendan Barrington, one of the most consequential editors in non-fiction. My enormous thanks to the Penguin teams in Dublin and London for the welcome I’ve received and the love they’ve shown this book.”

The book’s blurb reads: “Since childhood, Hilary Adam White has been an urban falconer in Dublin. When Hilary’s father was seriously ill and approaching the end of his life, Hilary, already busy with his own young son and wanting to spend more time with his father, concluded that he had to return his beloved sparrowhawk, Sarah Green, to the wild.

“Without a hawk to look after, Hilary found himself drawn to the many places in Dublin where raptors nest and hunt. Told against the backdrop of his father’s last days and of Hilary’s mourning, City of Hawks gives an eye-opening account of the fascinating urban ecologies and interactions between hawks (whose numbers have skyrocketed thanks to the banning of DDT and other factors), other bird and mammal species, humans and the human-built environment. It is at once a fabulously authoritative account of an animal type (raptors) and a city (Dublin) that Hilary knows in great depth, and a brilliant illumination of the ways in which all city-dwellers share their urban spaces with wild animals.”

Hilary Adam White is a writer, journalist and conservationist from Dublin. His work has appeared in the Dublin Review, Winter Papers, Tolka, Archaeology Ireland, Sunday Independent, Irish Independent, Irish Examiner and Irish Times. He is a recipient of the Literature Bursary and Agility awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. City of Hawks is his first book.