Ten of the most admirable 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:

Keith Corcoran in The Infinite Tides by Christian Kiefer

A hugely fallible man – borderline OCD, hyper-logical, possibly with traces of autism – Keith Corcoran is an astronaut on the International Space Station whose family life dissolves while he's on board. He returns to gravity and an empty home. This is an elegantly written book that juggles many a grand idea. My favourite: that Keith attaches such importance to mundane objects such as his television and his sofa, while in the backdrop lies the immensity of outer space.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see: Julie Buntin's top ten literary kids with deadbeat and/or absent dads.

--Marshal Zeringue