Books like

Books like H is for Hawk

12 books with a reading profile close to H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Deep, inward-looking and contemplative; a moderate read.

1

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama

Also inward-looking and contemplative · biography, memoir

Barack Obama reconstructs his personal history and identity as a biracial man in America through a narrative that spans Honolulu, Chicago, and Kenya.
2

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

In August 2022, thirty-three years after the fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution.
3

Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

In this memoir, Kiese Laymon addresses his mother to recount a childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, shaped by academic rigor and physical discipline.
4

Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice

by Cristina Rivera Garza

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

In 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered in Mexico City by an ex-boyfriend who refused to accept the end of their relationship.
5

Into the Wild

by Jon Krakauer

biography, memoir

In 1992, Chris McCandless abandoned his possessions and middle-class expectations to live off the land in the Alaskan interior.
6

Stay True

by Hua Hsu

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

Hua Hsu recounts his undergraduate years at Berkeley in the mid-1990s, focusing on his complex friendship with Ken, a Japanese American peer whose mainstream tastes Hsu initially judged as conventional.
7

Out of Africa

by Isak Dinesen

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

Isak Dinesen chronicles seventeen years spent managing a coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills in Kenya.
8

Paula

by Isabel Allende

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Isabel Allende began writing this chronicle in 1991 while sitting bedside in a Spanish hospital where her daughter, Paula, lay in a porphyria-induced coma.
9

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Jeanette Winterson’s memoir returns to her upbringing in a strict Pentecostal household in Northern England, expanding on the lived reality behind her debut novel.
10

Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

Joan Didion examines the illness and 2005 death of her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, while confronting her own physical decline.
11

Happening

by Annie Ernaux

Also deep and inward-looking · memoir, narrative

In 1963, when abortion remained illegal in France, Annie Ernaux, then a university student, discovered she was pregnant.
12

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

In 2016, Dani Shapiro submitted a DNA kit for analysis, expecting to confirm her Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

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