The top ten absent fathers in fiction

D.W. Wilson was born and raised in the small towns of the Kootenay Valley, British Columbia. He is the recipient of the University of East Anglia's inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship - the most prestigious award available to students in the MA program. Wilson's short stories have been awarded the BBC National Short Story Award and the CBC Short Story Prize. Ballistics is his first novel.

For the Guardian, Wilson named his top ten admirable absent fathers in fiction, including:

Annie and Suzanne Bird's missing father in Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden

He's rarely mentioned, but his absence provides the space for one of the novel's two narrators, Will Bird, to take up the father-figure slack – though Will himself can't exactly claim a flawless record when it comes to loyalty and family. Set in northern Ontario, this book traces, simultaneously, a young woman's search for her missing sister and an ageing man's multi-generational feud.

Learn about the other entries on the list.

Read Ray Taras's review of Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce.

--Marshal Zeringue