Celebrate Father's Day with these books that feature the complicated realities of fatherhood.
Irving, John, 1942-
2009
In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, a twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear, and kills her. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto, pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, who befriends them.
Ozma, Alice
2011
When Alice Ozma was in 4th grade, she and her single father, an elementary school librarian, made a pact to see if he could read aloud to her for 100 consecutive nights. Alice's father read aloud to her every night without fail until the day she left for college. Told in a series of vignettes about Alice's relationship with her dad and the life lessons she learned from the stories he read to her.
Shields, David, 1956-
2008
The author melds personal history with frank biological data about every stage of life, creating an "autobiography about my body" that seeks meaning in death, but moreover, life. Shields filters his frank--and usually foreboding--data through his own experience as a 51-year-old father with burgeoning back pain, contrasting his own gloomy tendencies with the defiant perspective of his own 97-year-old father, a man who has waged a lifelong, urgent battle against the infirmities of time.--From amazon.com.
Harding, Paul, 1967-
2009
On his deathbed, surrounded by his family, George Washington Crosby's thoughts drift back to his childhood and the father who abandoned him when he was twelve.
Lee, Harper, author
2010
Two children in a small southern town are thrust into an adult world of racial bigotry and hatred when their lawyer father chooses to defend a black man unjustly accused of raping a white girl.
