My Fathers' Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging

By Hannah Pool and Hannah Azieb Pool

Book Overview

What do you wear to meet your father for the first time?

In 2004, Hannah Pool knew more about next season's lipstick colors than she did about Africa: a beauty editor for The Guardian newspaper, she juggled lattes and cocktails, handbags and hangouts through her twenties just like any other beautiful, independent Londoner. Her white, English adoptive relatives were beloved to her and were all the family she needed.

Okay, if I treat it as a first date, then I'm on home turf. What image do I want to put across?...Classic, rather than trendy, and if my G-string doesn't pop out, I should be able to carry the whole thing off.

Contacted by relatives she didn't know she had, she decided to visit Eritrea, the war-torn African country of her birth, and answer for herself the daunting questions every adopted child asks.

Imagine what it's like to never have seen another woman or man from your own family. To spend your life looking for clues in the faces of strangers...We all need to know why we were given up.

What Hannah Pool learned on her journey forms a narrative of insight, wisdom, wit, and warmth beyond all expectations.

When I stepped off the plane in Asmara, I had no idea what lay ahead, or how those events would change me, and if I'd thought about it too hard I probably wouldn't have gotten farther than the baggage claim.

A story that will "send shivers down [your] spine," (The Bookseller), My Fathers' Daughter follows Hannah Pool's brave and heartbreaking return to Africa to meet the family she lost -- and the father she thought was dead.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416594906
• ISBN13: 9781416594901
• Release Date: January 2012
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Was surprised at how much I loved it...

I loved this book! I'm not sure what I was expecting...maybe I had low expectations?...but it was an engaging, entertaining and informative read. We are in the process of adopting a daughter from Ethiopia. I felt like I could have been reading my daughter's journal 30 years from now. I highly recommend it!

spoken just how it is!!!

I am a "birth" mother who has been affected by adoption and reunite. I married the father two years after relinquishing my rights to my first born son and then later had two more kids together. I loved how real Hannah Pool was in retelling her story. She explanned in such great detail the emotions and feelings that come over you when you are reunited with your lost one through adoption. These feeling ARE real, feelings that I too didn't know exist until going through them myself. We can't change what has happened...Thank you Hannah for sharing your story. Hearing the adoptees feelings so candid, validated to me how much my first born son DOES truly love me. Keri Stone

My Father's Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging

Great read! Very insightful information about an african adult adoptee growing up in a predominantly white family and area. Very interesting to hear her inner thoughts and feelings as she returned to the country she was born in, and to meet with people who are her blood relatives. I highly recommend this book.

A Story of Adoption

Hannah Pool, a journalist for a British newspaper, was born in a small Eritrean town called Keren in 1974. Placed in an orphanage in Asmara, Eritrea's capital, shortly after her birth she grew up believing her mother had died in childbirth with her father dying shortly afterwards. When she was roughly six months old, malnourished and suffering from chicken pox, she was adopted by David Pool, a British academic, and his American wife, Marya. At the time, David was teaching at the University of Khartoum and Marya was doing voluntary work with some nuns. Marya died when Hannah was four and briefly went to stay with some friends in Norway before moving back to England with her dad. By the time she was twenty, David was lecturing at Manchester University, with Eritrean politics among his areas of expertise. When Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s, the guerrilla fighters he'd got to know in the 1970s had become government ministers. David was among the people invited over for the celebrations and, on impulse, went looking for the orphanage in Asmara. Not only was it still standing, it was still being run by the same nun - Sister Gabriela - who'd arranged Hannah's adoption. Several months after David's return home came the bombshell : a priest David had spoken to at the orphanage wrote a letter with the news that not only was Hannah's biological father still alive, she also had at least one older brother. "My Fathers' Daughter" tells the story of Hannah's trip back to Eritrea to meet her 'natural' family for the first time. This is a very easily read book, though it can't have been a very easy one to write. Hannah doesn't spare herself - her doubts, panics, frustrations and the occasional bout of confusion are all covered. The fact that much of the book is written in the present tense, in nearly a conversational tone, really helped put those feelings across. At times, it felt like I was intruding on something a little too personal - like someone else's diary, I was unsure I 'should' be reading parts of it. At the same time, however, it almost felt like the book finished too soon. The epilogue, looking back over the year after she returned home, could nearly have been worth a book itself. Very highly recommended.