14 Books About Fathers and Sons, Ranked by Distance

A man and a boy walk south through a country that has burned. McCarthy never explains what happened and never needs to. What you get instead is the daily arithmetic of keeping a child alive: two tins of food, a tarp, a pistol with a fixed number of bullets, a repeated conversation about whether they are still the good guys. The two are never named. They are the man and the boy, and by page thirty you understand that this is the most exact description of parenting anyone has written, which is that you are keeping something alive in a world you cannot fix.

Herman Roth is a retired insurance man from Newark: stubborn, exhausting, incapable of meeting a stranger without mentioning his son the writer. A brain tumour is diagnosed and Philip becomes the one who drives to appointments, argues about surgery, and cleans up after the worst nights. The book is short and never once reaches for grace. What makes it hurt is the specificity, the fight over a shaving mug, the boxes of documents, the moment a son notices his father has become an item on a calendar. It is the least sentimental father book I know and somehow the most loving.

Ousep Chacko is a Malayali journalist in 1990s Madras, brilliant when sober and unbearable when not, which is most evenings. His seventeen year old son Unni, a cartoonist everybody loved, walked to the balcony one afternoon and jumped. Three years later Ousep is still knocking on doors, collecting comics, asking teenagers what Unni actually believed. Manu Joseph writes middle class south India with a comic precision that keeps ambushing you: the mother arguing with herself in the kitchen, the younger brother measuring his own worth against a dead boy. The funniest book on this list is also the saddest one.

Ashoke Ganguli survives a train accident in Bengal, partly because of the book he was holding, and years later in America he names his son Gogol after the writer of it. Gogol grows up in Massachusetts hating the name, legally changing it, dating his way into a life his parents cannot follow. Lahiri writes migration as a series of small mistranslations: the parties with too much food, the phone calls at odd hours, the parents who never explain themselves because explaining is not a thing they do. The father barely raises his voice in the entire novel and is the loudest presence in it.

In 1919 Kafka wrote a long letter to Hermann Kafka, a self made shopkeeper who found his son weak, and gave it to his mother to pass on. She did not pass it on, and it reached print only decades after both men were dead. What survives is the most exact anatomy of a certain kind of father: the sarcasm at the dinner table, the rules he does not follow himself, the approval that arrives only when the son is out of the room. Kafka is also unfair in places, and he knows it, and says so, which is what saves the thing from being a rant.

It is a play, so it reads in ninety minutes and hits like a bus. Willy Loman is a travelling salesman at the end of his usefulness, living inside a story where he is well liked and his boys are going to be somebody. His son Biff has come home knowing the truth about both of them. The two circle each other for two acts while the mother holds the house upright with her bare hands. What Miller understood is that the cruelest thing a father can do is hand his son a version of himself and then refuse to accept returns.

Coates addresses the entire book to his son, then fifteen, after a grand jury declined to indict a police officer. He goes back over his own Baltimore childhood and its rules, the years at Howard, the killing of a college friend by police, and what he is now obliged to hand over. The unusual part is the honesty about fathering itself. He tells the boy he cannot promise safety, will not offer comfort he does not believe in, and recognises that the fear which made his own father's hand hard is the same fear now sitting in his hands.

Maclean was in his seventies when he wrote this, looking back at Montana in the 1930s, at his father the minister and his younger brother Paul, the finest fisherman any of them had seen and a man nobody could help. The fishing is not a metaphor you have to work for. It is the single place where the three of them are fluent together, and everywhere else the family runs straight into the limit of what love can actually accomplish for another person. The last page is the part people carry around for years afterwards.

McCourt grew up in Limerick in the 1930s and 40s in poverty that is genuinely hard to read about: dead siblings, a flooded ground floor, one pair of shoes between the boys. His father Malachy is charming, unemployable, and gone to the pub with the money before the family sees any of it. What makes the book work is that Frank as a boy adores him. The stories by the fire before dawn are real love, and so is the hunger, and the child holds both without editing either one. Told in the present tense, without self pity, and funnier than it has any right to be.

Jaballa Matar was a Libyan dissident living in exile in Cairo when he was seized and handed to the Gaddafi government. Letters came out of prison for a while, then nothing at all. Hisham Matar was nineteen. The book follows the son's return to Libya after the revolution, years of petitioning officials, conversations with released prisoners, and the particular torture of a disappearance, which is that there is no grave, no confirmation, and a father who is neither alive nor dead in any way you can file. Matar writes about exile and painting too, and the sentences here are the finest on this list.

Ajay is eight when the family moves to America, worshipping his older brother Birju, who has a place at a top school and knows everything worth knowing. Then Birju is left brain damaged by a swimming pool accident and the household reorganises itself around a bed in the living room. The father, mild and competent back in Delhi, becomes an alcoholic in slow motion while the mother runs on faith and a stream of visitors. Sharma writes in flat short sentences that seem almost childish until you realise they are the only way anyone could say these things.

Satyanarayana tells his family story across three generations, beginning with his grandfather Narsiah and settling on his father Baliah, a Madiga man who worked on the railways and moved from posting to posting so that his children could stay in school. The writing is plain and the book is not a lament. It is a record of what it took, in particular rupees and particular humiliations, for one family in twentieth century Telangana to get educated. The father here is not complicated by literature. He is a man carrying a load, and the load is described exactly.

Arkady brings his friend Bazarov home for the summer. Bazarov is a nihilist, which in 1862 meant a man who accepted nothing on authority, and he is rude about poetry, romance and the older generation's entire way of living. Arkady's father, gentle and faintly embarrassed by himself, tries to keep up by reading the new books his son mentions. Meanwhile Bazarov's own parents, who adore him, tiptoe around their son so as not to bore him. The novel is short, very funny about young men, and merciless about how small a parent will make himself to stay in contact.

Edward Bloom is dying, and his son William sits by the bed trying to get one true story out of the man. What he gets instead are legends: the giant, the town nobody ever leaves, the day his father caught an uncatchable fish. Wallace writes in short chapters that read like folk tales with a hospital room underneath them. The question in the book is one a lot of us carry. If your father only ever spoke in jokes and stories, did you know him at all, and was the story he told about himself the closest thing to truth he had?