‘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 more than its fair share 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. 

Gabriel’s Lament by Paul Bailey (shortlisted, 1986)

Bailey’s novels usually have eccentric, maddening parents in them – including his other Booker shortlisting, Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977) – but with Gabriel’s Lament, which has a claim to be his masterpiece, he turned everything up to eleven. Oscar Harvey is a malodorous, mean, belching, homophobic tower of foulness who takes it out on his young son Gabriel when his wife (not unreasonably) runs off for a quieter life. He calls his son names – ‘cursed oaf’, ‘piss-a-bed’ – as he loafs around the palatial home he bought through a mysterious bequest. (On the plus side, he also hates men who wear suede shoes.) 

Bailey said as he was writing the book, Gabriel’s father just became ‘more and more monstrous’ and he ‘couldn’t stop’, which is entirely reflected in the comic brio with which he fills Oswald’s rants (Bailey’s dialogue is always a treat). It’s a book that proves readerly enjoyment comes not from nice characters or nasty ones, but the energy with which they’re presented. There’s even room for a small twist near the end, which may alter the reader’s view of the old duffer.

Bad dad rating: 5/5

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

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (longlisted, 2004)

There’s no messing about in Adichie’s debut novel: in the first line, the narrator’s father Eugene hurls a book across the room and smashes some china figurines. Kambili, a Nigerian teenager, has to suffer his religious fanaticism at home, and the tyranny of an authoritarian government too. Her father is a brute – he scalds her feet to prepare her for the fires of hell – but he is also ‘The One Who Does for the Community’, a local hero who owns factories and publishes the only newspaper willing to criticise the government. He believes he is doing right – ‘Why do you walk into sin?’ he asks, as he cries after beating his children with a belt. 

Purple Hibiscus asks us whether a bad father can be a good man, whether he deserves what Adichie called ‘a complicated sympathy’ – but like the best books, it offers no easy answers.

Bad dad rating: 4/5

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 Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (shortlisted, 1993)

The central figure in Shields’s first Booker-shortlisted novel (she was also shortlisted in 2002 for her final novel Unless) is a Canadian woman: Daisy Goodwill Flett. But looming large in her life is her father, stonemason Cuyler Goodwill, who was romantically and erotically devoted to his wife Mercy until she died giving birth to Daisy. Her diaries trace, among other things, her father’s future, when, bereft of his beloved wife, he moves from Canada to the U.S., where he cuts stones and delivers wordy wisdom to anyone who will listen. (His polar opposite is Daisy’s father-in-law, Magnus Flett, a dour Scotsman and a different sort of father figure for her.) 

The Stone Diaries covers Daisy’s life in ten-year jumps, from the start to the end of the 20th century, making it an ambitious novel, full of life, from a writer who – despite her prizes and acclaim – is still underrated.

Bad dad rating: 3/5 

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

I’ll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward (shortlisted, 2004)

‘You know, my dear, all my life I’ve been scared of death,’ says Janus Brian at the funeral of his wife, ‘but since Mary died I’ve come to the conclusion that it is life that’s the really frightening thing.’ This is the story of Janus Brian and his extended family – sister Colette, brother Lesley, nephew Janus – almost all of whom cope with the really frightening thing by drinking too much. 

Unusually for this list, the father in this book, Colette’s husband Aldous, is a still, calm presence – at least until he turns to whisky to cope with everyone else. It sounds grim, but Woodward has the timing of a comedian and a huge heart for all his characters, however flawed; his brilliant deadpan style delivers humour and tragedy in the same register and lets the reader sort them out. As a result, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon is an exceptionally touching and entertaining novel that was every bit the equal of its shortlist rivals in a very strong year.

Bad dad rating: 2/5 

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

The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee (longlisted, 2016)

Simón is a father with a difference: the young boy David who goes everywhere with him is not related to him at all (‘not my grandson, not my son,’ he repeatedly reminds people), but Simón takes care of him anyway. In double Booker-winner Coetzee’s strange, elusive allegory, poor Simón does his best to look after David in the city of Estrella, where neither has any memory of their past life: searching for David’s mother, enrolling him in a dance academy, steering him away from bad influences like the sinister, priapic Dmitri. In trying to teach his surrogate son about the world, Simón – hopeless as a father, but ever-hopeful – learns more than David does. 

This book, the central volume of a trilogy, divided opinion on publication, but it is a profound work containing comedy, action and provocation from one of the greatest living writers in the English language.

Bad dad rating: 1/5

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