Dad books

Brian finds its place on this list not just because its namesake is a textbook ‘Dad Name’… Beyond this, Brain is an appraisal of life’s small rituals, of male friendships, and above all, of the power of art and the community it fosters. Following the gentle day to day of a BFI regular, Brain recounts the particulars of a carefully crafted daily routine, and nightly trips to the cinema, of film buff Brian. Through a genuinely heartwarming and subtly humorous plot we learn to truly care for the main-character and his particular, quirky habits. Alongside this narrative, Brian is also packed full of brilliant film recommendations that will surely leave any cinema-frequenting father satisfied!

On the surface this might appear to be in the “traditional” Dad book category… but it’s actually secretly subverting those norms. Mining a youth spent obsessing over military model-making and derring-do war fiction, Luke Turner takes a thoughtful and considered – maybe even gently radical – approach to how we see masculinity in conflict. With the Second World War as a focus, Turner excavates a new narrative of that time, eschewing the jingoistic, the heteronormative, the deafeningly masculine. In doing so, he offers an alternative view of combat and those who found themselves at its sharpest edges, sensitively recasting their roles in a more emotionally adept fashion – love, fear, objection, trauma. The storytelling is beautiful, the research present but not intrusive: this book takes a familiar story of war and personalises it in new, sensitive ways.

This astonishingly good debut has gone straight to the top of Siúbhan’s favourites list. Close to Home is a tender, thoughtful and vivid portrait of working class Belfast, an astute fictional rendering of masculinity and generational trauma (perhaps the best we’ve ever read), and a timely examination of the disillusionment and disenfranchisement of an entire generation in post Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland. 

Where We Come From is one of the most important music books of the decade (please take it from us, we have read our share of over-egged hyperbolic rock bios), one that not only understands the societal strictures that create a musical ecosystem but immerses itself with the people at the centre of it. Like a refined gonzo-journalist approach, if you like? All the action but none of the self-centredness? Anyway, the inherent drama and virtuosity of the UK rap scene plays out in all its stormy glory and Aniefiok Ekpoudom’s galloping prose is the perfect method of delivery – cannot recommend it enough, no matter your level of acquaintance with the subject matter.

It might be 700 pages long, it might be deliriously, psychedelically gruesome, but it is also one of the most deeply involving novels you’re likely to read. The sheer length and extremity of the material only serve to highlight what a work of intense craft and construction it really is. Gaspar is a special boy, born into a family bound by a generations-long occult obsession, one that his father has tried to protect him from across a period of decades. Intergenerational drama, shocking outbursts of nightmarish violence, trippy Jodorowskian visuals, an ingenious weave through modern Argentinean history: it’s got everything you could possibly want from a book with a gigantic claw on the cover. 

If your Dad is a Stephen King Dad, this one’s for him. For one, King is a fan. But it’s also got the IT-like narrative jumps and epic scale, but is a little more elevated (sorry Stephen). It’s a thin-end of the wedge to get folks into the nicher, more literary Latin American horror explosion that’s currently happening and we are LAPPING UP.

A blistering, almost psychedelic tale of fathers and sons and masculinity, shot through with a ghostly nostalgia. Set on the Paraná River in Argentina, Not a River follows the fishing trip of Enero, El Negro, and  Tilo. After catching and killing a giant ray, they seem to have disturbed something, intruding upon a wider, delicate ecology of which they’re not part. The choric quality of the narration interweaves the intruder’s voices with those of the local inhabitants; in fact, Almada’s prose skillfully interweaves the past with the present, the living with the dead, the human with the animal. It’s a novel that seems to ripple, like the river that runs through it, with many undercurrents and tributaries, seamlessly connecting past and present, surface and depths.  

Although the very existence of this book is in no small part due to a huge tragedy, specifically the loss to suicide of the author’s dear friend and artistic collaborator Scott Hutchison, we defy you to read a more empowering and heartening document. Michael Pedersen, a poet of international renown and a wonderfully idiosyncratic style, gently uses his experience to create an assessment of the platonic male relationships in his life, assembling them for us with often-hilarious anecdotal reportage, contextualising them within his own life, wondering just what each one has meant or will mean to his own personality.

Having happily devoured most of his exquisite backlist (the word “Zambra-naut” has been bandied around), we can say with certainty that Chilean Poet is Alejandro Zambra at the top of his game. Starting as a coming-of-age story for the aspiring (and quite bad) poet, Gonzalo, it ventures into more comings-of-age as the novel progresses: Gonzalo has a coming-of-dad when he reunites with his high school girlfriend and becomes a sort of step-dad to her son, Vicente, who himself has his own boy-to-(failed)poet-to-man arc.

Sweeping in scale yet closely observed in Zambra’s trademark ironic-yet-profound style, this is the perfect balance of literary virtuosity and juicy narrative fiction.

If there’s a book that screams “Dad” more loudly than any other book in the shop, I think it’s this one! Drawn & Quarterly are one of our all-time favourite publishers for their beautiful and esoteric graphic novels, and this is no exception: the story of Leonard Cohen’s illustrious life and career told through flashbacks during his final hours in graphic novel form. Who’d have thunk it? But it works perfectly.

You’ll know the premise from plenty of other post-apocalyptic novels from across the 20th Century – an unnamed disaster of some kind, much radiation, catastrophes unceasing etc – but few authors have tackled the formula with such grace, darkness and intrigue. Termush is the name of an imaginatively luxe hotel complex for which only the very wealthy have been able to make reservations, specifically to outlast the fallout of the aforementioned unnamed disaster. Inevitably outside forces seek to penetrate the inhabitants’ paid-for safety and, of course, *bad stuff ensues*, but Holm’s blunt, almost sterile prose drapes the perfect veil over the unfolding terror. If you liked Kay Dick’s They, or Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, you’ll want to make a reservation.

A lost gem of one of our favourite literary genres: classic British science-fiction. FFO of John Wyndham, perhaps, but if he were a lot more subtle. Written in the ‘70s as a series of connected short stories about future British dystopia, They follows a sinister but murkily understood organisation stalking artists, writers, musicians and free-thinkers throughout the British countryside. Abstract, but tightly-written and absolutely terrifying.

​If your dad is a fan of the narrative investigations of Jon Ronson, Julia Ebner and Patrick Radden Keefe, we’ve found his new favourite book. Sam Knight’s painstakingly researched and beautifully written history of a little known government department which logged reports of premonitions submitted by the general public through the 1960s and beyond hits that perfect intersection of ‘I can’t believe this happened’ and ‘it’s so ludicrous it had to happen’. Tragedies like the Aberfan disaster, plane crashes, assassinations: all predicted if you look at the premonitions from a certain angle, and Knight’s knack for relaying them sensitively, analytically and with a nose for the absurd, gives this book the dynamic feel of a well-plotted thriller.

Don’t be immediately put off by this, but reading this book is to experience a truly unique academic lecture. Taking the form of four annotated short stories written by the Russian masters of the form (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol), this is a truly enlightening insight into the nuts and bolts of writing stories and – at a deeper level – the nature of creativity. George Saunders is a giant of the short story in his own right, and his gentle yet learned approach to these classic works sheds light on the process of their composition, and on the wider rhythms of how stories in their essence are told.

Dawn is a science-fiction novel which is nothing short of mind-blowing. I don’t want to go into too much detail, because I went into this one totally cold – and all the better for it! The blurb won’t spoil too much, but I said just dive in!

Here’s a few things: we’ve rarely read anything that confronted the divide between human and non-human so vividly; we’ve rarely read anything that had such a profound moral dilemma at its core. Octavia Butler tackles colossal themes with seeming ease. Even if you’ve read some of her more famous novels, you’ve got no idea what’s coming for you in this baby!

A chronicle of modern fatherhood, charged by societal inequalities, racism and the deep observational experiences of walking a baby to sleep in the early hours of the morning, Shukla’s memoir is stunningly good at balance: he is angry but warm, irritable but supportive, addicted to his phone but unstoppably in the moment. Brown Baby is a love-letter to his own daughter and to his own mother, and the joys and griefs associated. Rich, funny and connected.

Tower ticks all the thinking-dad boxes: a collection of interconnected science fiction short stories, translated from Korean, all set in the fictional sovereign nation of Beanstalk, a 700-storey mega-skyscraper. It is slapstick, and farcical, and really funny but comes with a good dollop of political commentary. Perfecto!

Does your dad reminisce about listening to deeply heavy and cosmic music in his youth? Monolithic Undertow will have him reaching for the expensive headphones and the easy chair (if he ever left it), a history and celebration of all things drone-related, from the subterranean rumblings in below-ground churches to the days-long ‘happenings’ of the New York scene, right up to the punishing, face-melting assault of the modern drone scene.

Dads are the ultimate pedants, and we guarantee every dad will find a little bit of themselves in the narrator of this heavily footnoted novelette that hilariously chronicles a single lunch hour: including bonus digressions on staplers, shoelaces, milk spout design and communal toilet etiquette.

The poet and essayist is fairly peerless when it comes to topics of race and culture in modern America, but where this collection of essays shines brightest is when Abdurraqib’s unbidden enthusiasm for this subjects comes through: so that means Lando Calrissian, the recorded output of Whitney Houston and the power of a good game of spades. Indispensible, angry when necessary, brutally entertaining.

An obscenely satisfying book of absolute grammatical and verbal correctness that will make your dad feel even more vindicated when he tells you for the ten thousandth time that it’s FEWER, not LESS.

Washington Black is a textbook banger. An action-packed, continent-spanning novel about two unlikely companions that perfectly balances big themes with rip-roaring adventure. Endorsed by us… but also recently endorsed by one of our very own dads!

Dryly humorous and compelling humane dispatches from the people who are trying to safeguard themselves from the end of the world, from doomsday preppers to tech billionaires buying up huge chunks of New Zealand to ride out the apocalypse in comfort.

A Day That’s Ours: Blake Nuto 

This beautiful picture book is a celebration of idleness, pancakes, and slow moments spent together. Forgetting the maddened morning rush and relishing in the joys of doing nothing much at all, a father and daughter spend their final day together before the school year begins. Celebrating the small and simple things, and the preciousness of time spent together, this book is a reminder, for both parents and children alike, to slow down, celebrate the small things, and to eat more pancakes! 

One of the genuinely sweetest (and I don’t mean sickly sweet) picture books we have in the shop. A celebration of the things dads do – not necessarily super-heroic or astronautic – like baking our favourite cookies, growing carrots, or just doing the grocery shopping together.

Hey, we know that kids like to buy their dads a book too, and this is a recent favourite – a beautifully illustrated and lyrically written bedtime story that will teach you a lot about both dads AND penguins, which is always a bonus.

The picture book equivalent of Grandpa Simpson’s classic “I used to be with it. Then they changed what ‘it’ was” moment. This is a lovely little picture book about dads and their professed coolness from the perspective of a child who wonders why their dad gave up the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Fun to read together, if just to tease their music taste.

Madcap, bold, colourful board book featuring a lovely Dad woodpecker teaching his progeny how to peck. More importantly, an absolute hit with the babies. (Trust us, we know from experience). Great fun to read as the book slowly becomes more and more covered in holes…

Little Crab and Very Big Crab are on a trip from the rockpools (their home) to the sea side (exciting… but actually a bit scary once you get up close?). Little Crab gets pretty apprehensive about the whole thing – but, and I sense you know what’s going to happen, it ends up in a whoppingly good time. If you haven’t read any Chris Haughton before, you’re in for a treat. Great crab- and sea-based onomatopoeia as well as his signature abstract art-style. Take things at your own pace, Little Crab. That’s ok!