The most memorable fictional fathers from the Booker Library, ranked from worst to best

‘A stodgy parent is no fun at all,’ wrote Roald Dahl in Danny the Champion of the World. ‘What a child wants – and deserves – is a parent who is SPARKY.’ Danny’s father in Dahl’s book was particularly sparky, full of ideas, learning and kindness while always retaining a sense of fun.

Fiction is full of fathers who do and don’t live up to Dahl’s ideal. Many of the most memorable dads are the rotters, perhaps because niceness – goodness – is harder to convey: as Henry de Montherlant put it, ‘Happiness writes with white ink on a white page’. 

The Booker Library has seen a strong run of good and bad dads in recent years. George Saunders’s 2017 winner Lincoln in the Bardo was about Abraham Lincoln visiting the grave of his son, and finding new strength there to take control of the American Civil War. Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, shortlisted in 2023, featured an Irish family with father Dickie Barnes at the centre, whose confusions and past betrayals of himself lead everyone around him into danger.

Further back in the Booker Library, Marina Warner’s The Lost Father, shortlisted in 1988, shows that even an absent father – in Warner’s novel the family patriarch died young – can influence the direction of the lives of those left behind.

For Father’s Day, we’ve put together a selection of some of the most striking fathers in the Booker Library – the good, the bad and the monstrous – and ranked them, from worst to best. 

Amongst Women by John McGahern (shortlisted, 1990)

‘As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters.’ The opening line of this – one of the greatest novels ever to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize – encourages the reader to sympathise with the central character, even to feel sorry for him. But Moran is a monster, albeit a complex one, and a man ‘in opposition to everything’. He used to have power – was a leader in the IRA in the Irish independence war of the 1920s – but now has none, except power over his family. He vents his resentment by dominating his wife and daughters, while his sons were driven away by his threats of violence. The women in his family both fear and revere him – he’s their father, after all – while he sees his family simply as ‘a larger version of himself’. 

The book is meticulously pared down – every word counts – and the original draft was several times its final length. It took McGahern ten years to write, during which time – according to his friend Colm Tóibín – ‘he sometimes believed he was finished as a novelist’. Instead, he produced a masterpiece with one of the greatest, and worst, fathers in fiction.

Bad dad rating: 4.5/5

Our Fathers by Andrew O’Hagan (shortlisted, 1999)

As the title suggests, O’Hagan’s debut novel – and the first of his three Booker nominations – features not one father but two. Jamie Bawn moves from his adopted home of Liverpool back to Glasgow where his grandfather Hugh is dying. But he’s also involved professionally in the demolition of the now-knackered tower blocks – ‘castles’ for the working class – that Hugh built in the 1970s. Between them comes Hugh’s son and Jamie’s father, Robert, a classic bad dad, a grudge-filled alcoholic who lives in ‘a flurry of hatred’. 

The story – that blend of the personal and political that O’Hagan does so well – shows how the young eventually eclipse their elders, with the biblical cadences of the prose matching the granite landscape. It’s not a cheerful novel – ‘our fathers were made for grief’ is the line that gives the book its title – but its portrayal of masculine relationships is punchy and powerful.

Bad dad rating: Robert 4/5, Hugh 2/5

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud (longlisted, 2006)

The privilege of having a famous father is a mixed blessing in Messud’s complex morality tale of New Yorkers at the turn of the 21st century. Murray Thwaite is a stalwart of the US liberal journalism scene, a self-important but talented narcissist who casts a long shadow over his daughter Marina’s glittering but empty life – even without actively bad parenting, his influence on her is critical to her own sense of self-worth. Murray’s hypocrisy is at the centre of the novel – he advocates equality but he and Marina leave the family cat’s sick for his wife to clean up. But a reckoning is coming, as the reader can foretell, as September 2001 approaches these elite Manhattanites. It renders their ‘self-absorbed striving’ into ‘a state of innocence’, said Messud, in an epic story which carries its influences, from Henry James to Leo Tolstoy, so lightly that the reader’s pleasure never drops.

Bad dad rating: 3/5

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (shortlisted, 2008)

Toltz’s barnstorming debut is one of those epic novels – like the works of Tom Wolfe or John Irving – that achieves its brilliance through accumulation of character, detail and boisterous charm. The characters who win us over are the young Australian boy Jasper Dean and his father Martin, the latter a man who wants to make his mark on the world and doesn’t care how – so he writes a book about crime and associates with murderers. He’s not so hot on the family stuff, like marriage (‘I mean, when I go from the bedroom to the bathroom, the last thing I want to do is stop to have a chat’), but he loves Jasper and, in his own way, does his best for him. But the book is also a celebration of the kind of high-octane, popular entertainment it exhibits. 

As Jasper says at one point: ‘If a man giggles at something puerile and his body glows from the joy, does it matter that it was caused not by some profound artwork but by a rerun of Bewitched? Honestly, who cares?’

Bad dad rating: 2/5

Bewilderment by Richard Powers (shortlisted, 2021)

Powers’s third Booker listing is a much smaller, more intimate work than his previous nominations: the story of a widowed father, Theo, and Robin, his neurodivergent son who’s struggling to cope with his mother’s death. Theo takes Robin to the Smoky Mountains where he finds calmness in nature – but he also tries a new AI-based therapy on him. (A hungry interest in everything, from science to music to space, is characteristic of Powers’s ambitious books.) Bewilderment – the title reflecting a perennial state of parenthood – pictures a frightening alternative America where a Trumpier-than-Trump president postpones the election. Theo is a counterweight for Robin against the horrors of the outside world – a good dad who tries to do his best even though he doesn’t always know how. Bewilderment portrays one of the great father-son relationships in modern fiction.

Bad dad rating: 0/5