By Kiran Dass
Dadland
Keggie Carew
When Keggie Carew's father encouraged her to skip school to go riding with him, he penned a cheeky note for the school explaining her absence: "I am sorry Keggie was not at school yesterday, she had a bad hangover." Charming, charismatic and a reckless maverick, Special Operations Executive Tom Carew was a member of an elite SOE unit whose purpose was to raise resistance in France and Burma during WWII. Decades later when he began to lose his memory, his daughter set about documenting his life.
In my father's den
Maurice Gee
A stone-cold classic of New Zealand literature which also inspired a blimmin' decent film adaptation by the late Brad McGann, In My Father's Den is a velvety evocative mood-piece, a thrilling psychological drama set in West Auckland. When 17-year-old Celia Inverarity is savagely murdered, her English teacher and mentor Paul Prior, who was the last person to see her alive, is tagged as a suspect. Backtracking to the past to find out what really happened takes Paul back to his father's den - an old poison shed in the garden - as past relationships, complicated family dynamics and shocking secrets unravel.
My old man: Tales of our fathers
Edited by Ted Kessler
Inspired by the Ian Dury song My Old Man to write a blog piece about his own father, journalist Ted Kessler then invited others to contribute essays detailing both positive and negative relationships, which went on to be collected in this fascinating book. This vibrant anthology collects an eclectic range of well-known people writing openly about their relationships with their fathers, including Leon n, Rod Stewart, Florence Welch and Paul Weller.
My father's island: A memoir
Adam Dudding
Sad, funny, forthright and beautifully written, My Father's Island sees journalist Adam Dudding seek stories to create a vivid portrait of his father, the eccentric, influential literary editor the late Robin Dudding. What is revealed is a complicated man who was at once liberal, open-minded and progressive but who also as controlling, manipulative and cranky as he was talented. Dudding recounts his relationship with his "long-haired, left-leaning, literature-loving Bohemian" father, growing up living hand-to-mouth in a rickety house with a garden teeming with chooks in suburban Auckland in the 1970s.
