One of Swanwick's top five fantasy books you won’t find in the fantasy section, as shared at Tor.com:Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions by Daniel WallaceRead about another entry on the list.
Edward Bloom, traveling salesman and absentee father, is dying and his son desperately wants to connect with and understand him. But the old man is a compulsive storyteller, and the entire book is told in the voice of the American tall tale. Wonderfully unreliable incidents involving a giant, a two-headed geisha, a magical glass eye, an underwater town, and of course a tremendous catfish overwhelm the inherent sadness of an old man’s death, and ultimately the facts must bow before the superiority of a good lie well told.
Big Fish was made into a movie which I could watch with pleasure every day of the week but the novel is much, much better.
--Marshal Zeringue