Book Review: The Beautifully Raw Memoir of My Father’s Daughter by Hannah Azieb Pool.

Book Review: The Beautifully Raw Memoir of My Father’s Daughter by Hannah Azieb Pool.

There is something strange about the way stories find us. Sometimes we go looking for them, and sometimes they quietly appear when we least expect it.

A few weeks ago, I found myself doing what many of us are guilty of doing late at night, doom scrolling on the internet. I was searching for symptoms, cures, explanations for things happening in my body, jumping from one article to the next, when I stumbled upon the story of Waris Dirie, also known as Desert Flower. Her story was powerful and haunting, and as I continued scrolling through articles and recommendations, the algorithm did what it does best. It led me to another name I had never heard before: Hannah Azieb Pool.

Curiosity has always been one of my greatest weaknesses when it comes to books. I read a little about her story, and before I knew it, I was searching for her memoir My Fathers’ Daughter. Something about it pulled me in immediately. Maybe it was the question of identity. Maybe it was the idea of belonging. Or maybe it was the quiet mystery of a life that had been split between two worlds.

Published in 2005, My Fathers’ Daughter tells the story of Hannah Azieb Pool, an Eritrean-British journalist who was adopted from an orphanage in Eritrea in 1974 and brought to England by her white adoptive father. She grew up in the UK believing she had no surviving relatives, building a life that felt complete yet carried an unspoken gap, the absence of anyone who shared her blood, her features, her history.

Imagine living your whole life without ever looking into the eyes of someone who looks like you.

For Hannah, that was her reality.

Then one day in her twenties, a letter arrived. A letter from a brother she never knew existed. In that moment, everything she thought she knew about her life began to unravel. The letter revealed that her birth father was alive and that her Eritrean family had been searching for her, hoping one day to reconnect.

But what do you do when a letter has the power to rewrite your entire story?

Hannah did what many of us might do when confronted with something too overwhelming to face, she hid it away. The letter stayed tucked away for ten years. Yet some truths refuse to remain buried. They whisper in the background of our lives until we are finally ready to listen.

A decade later, Hannah made a decision that would change her life forever. At the age of thirty, she travelled to Eritrea to meet the family she had never known.

What unfolds in My Fathers’ Daughter is not simply a reunion story. It is a deeply human journey into identity, memory, and the complicated meaning of home. Hannah leaves behind the familiarity of her metropolitan life in Britain and steps into a reality that could very easily have been hers, one marked by poverty, political tension, and the quiet resilience of people who have endured unimaginable hardships.

Reading this book felt less like reading a memoir and more like walking beside someone as they try to piece together fragments of their own story. The writing is immediate, raw, and incredibly honest. You feel the awkwardness of meeting countless relatives, some close and some distant. You feel her frustration when she is constantly introduced as “the one who returned.” You feel the physical discomfort of travelling through villages and cities where she stands out, both as someone who belongs and someone who doesn’t.

And yet, in the middle of all this discomfort, there are moments of warmth and connection. Moments of laughter with her sister. Moments of quiet recognition when something familiar appears in the face of a stranger who turns out to be family.

One of the things I loved most about this memoir is how honest Hannah is about the emotional complexity of it all. She does not romanticize the journey. She acknowledges that life in Eritrea is not easy and that, in many ways, she may have had more opportunities growing up in the UK. But at the same time, she does not pretend that adoption leaves no scars.

Some wounds never fully heal.

The book is strikingly raw in the way Hannah processes her emotions. There were moments where I found myself anticipating her reactions before she even described them, the numbness when something overwhelming happens, followed by the emotional collapse that comes later when you are finally alone. It felt so familiar, so human.

That honesty is what makes this memoir so powerful.

For anyone who has ever struggled with questions of identity, belonging, or where they truly come from, My Fathers’ Daughter will resonate deeply. It is a story about finding family, but it is also a story about confronting the uncomfortable truth that sometimes the life we live is shaped as much by chance as it is by choice.

For me personally, the book was also something else entirely. I had been searching for literature from Eritrea, hoping to learn more about a country whose stories are rarely centred in the global literary conversation. In that sense, Hannah’s memoir became an unexpected doorway. Through her journey, I was introduced to Eritrea not just as a place on a map, but as a living, breathing landscape of people, memories, and histories.

By the time I finished the final pages, I felt both moved and grateful. It is astonishing to think that such a powerful book is currently out of print, despite being part of Bernardine Evaristo’s curated Black Britain Writing Back series.

But perhaps that is exactly why stories like this need to be shared again and again.

My Fathers’ Daughter is not just a memoir about one woman’s journey back to her roots. It is a reminder that identity is rarely simple, that family can exist across oceans, and that sometimes the most important journeys we take are the ones that lead us back to where our story began.

If you have ever felt like you didn’t quite belong somewhere, or if you have ever wondered about the invisible threads that tie us to our past, this book will feel like a quiet conversation with your own questions.

And if you ask me, that is exactly the kind of book worth reading.