The Road
2006 · 287 pages
Pushing a shopping cart south through a burned gray America, a man and his boy hide from people who eat other people. The talk between them is the tenderest thing McCarthy ever wrote.
★ 8.3
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Pedro Paramo
1955 · 144 pages
Looking for the father he never met, a man walks into a Mexican town where everyone he speaks to is dead. Voices drift free of their bodies, and magical realism follows.
★ 8.0
Gilead
2004 · 247 pages
John Ames, an old preacher in Iowa, is dying and sets his life down for the seven-year-old son who will not remember him. Robinson makes an ordinary afternoon feel like grace.
★ 7.7
Fathers and Sons
1862 · 215 pages
Home from university, Arkady brings his friend Bazarov, who believes in nothing but science and refuses to respect anyone. Turgenev made the word nihilist famous and named a quarrel every family keeps having.
★ 7.2
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
1976 · 240 pages
In our family, Maclean writes, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. Two brothers and their minister father on the Big Blackfoot, and a love that cannot save anyone.
★ 6.9
Cry, the Beloved Country
1948 · 320 pages
A Zulu parson goes to Johannesburg to find his son and learns the boy killed a white man who fought for black South Africans. Paton's fifteen million readers made apartheid a world scandal.
★ 6.7
The Chosen
1967 · 271 pages
Two Brooklyn boys meet when one's line drive shatters the other's glasses at a yeshiva ball game. Danny, raised in silence to inherit a Hasidic dynasty, is secretly reading Freud in German.
★ 5.2
My Struggle
2009 · 448 pages
Six volumes of one man's life recorded to the last cornflake and cigarette, and at the center a father who drank himself to death, leaving a house his sons had to scrub clean.
★ 5.1
The Map and the Territory
2010 · 288 pages
Jed Martin, an artist, makes his name photographing Michelin road maps and painting people at their trades. Houellebecq writes himself into the novel, has himself murdered, and gives Jed a dying father.
★ 5.0
Dreams From My Father
1995 · 453 pages
Written at thirty-three, Obama's account of being the son of a Kenyan he met once runs from Hawaii to Jakarta to a Chicago organizing job, and ends at that father's grave.
★ 5.0