FICTION: THEMES
Dad Novels: 2010s
11 books
The most recent slate, where the thriller, the literary novel, and the true-survival story blurred together. Doerr and Tartt won Pulitzers; Flynn reinvented the domestic thriller with Gone Girl; Weir turned hard science into a comedy of survival in The Martian. Follett and Punke supply the historical heft, Luttrell the real war story, Larsson the international phenomenon. It's the decade the dad novel got a little more literary without losing the propulsion. Start with All the Light We Cannot See, or The Martian if you want the most fun on the list.
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Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett
Twelfth century England. The old king is dead, two claimants are fighting for the throne, and a master builder named Tom wants more than anything to build a cathedral. Follett spent years researching medieval construction and it shows — the architectural detail is specific enough to feel like a manual and propulsive enough that you never notice you're learning anything. The novel is eight hundred pages and most dads who started it finished it in under two weeks, which is the real testament to what Follett pulled off. The 2010 Starz miniseries starring Ian McShane and Rufus Sewell drove an enormous wave of readership and is worth watching after. The sequel World Without End covers the same territory a century later during the Black Death and is nearly as good.
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All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr
A blind French girl named Marie-Laure flees Paris with her father when the Germans invade, carrying a possibly legendary diamond. A German orphan named Werner builds radios and gets recruited into the Wehrmacht because of it. Their paths converge in the walled city of Saint-Malo during the Allied liberation in 1944. Doerr spent ten years writing this novel and it shows in every sentence — the prose is precise and luminous in ways that most popular fiction never attempts. It won the Pulitzer in 2015 and spent three years on the bestseller list, which means it cleared the bar of being both genuinely literary and genuinely readable. The 2023 Netflix adaptation is visually stunning. The literary outlier on this list, the same slot Catch-22 holds on the 60s list, operating in a completely different register.
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Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Nick Dunne's wife Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary. The media descends. Nick becomes the obvious suspect. Flynn tells the story in alternating voices — Nick in the present, Amy in diary entries — and the novel turns on itself so completely and so precisely that the less you know going in the better. Gone Girl launched an entire decade of unreliable narrator domestic thrillers and remains the best of them by a significant margin because Flynn is actually a serious novelist underneath the plot machinery. The 2014 David Fincher film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike is one of the finest adaptations on any of these lists — Fincher understood exactly what Flynn was doing and did it justice. The most purely surprising reading experience on this list.
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The Martian
Andy Weir
Astronaut Mark Watney gets left behind on Mars when his crew evacuates during a storm and assumes he's dead. He's not dead. He's got a habitat, some equipment, a background in botany, and four years before the next Mars mission arrives. What follows is four hundred pages of one man solving consecutive impossible problems with math, duct tape, and a specific brand of profane optimism that makes Watney one of the most purely enjoyable protagonists on any of these lists. Weir self-published this in 2011 and it spread through engineering departments and dad circles by word of mouth before Crown picked it up in 2014. The 2015 Ridley Scott film starring Matt Damon is one of the rare adaptations that captures a book's tone perfectly. The most fun you will have with any novel on this list.
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The Gray Man
Mark Greaney
Court Gentry is the CIA's most effective assassin. When the agency decides he's become a liability and puts a thirty-two million dollar contract on his head, every professional killer in the world comes after him simultaneously. Greaney launched one of the decade's best pure action series with this novel and built a devoted dad readership that worked through the backlist the way Reacher fans do — compulsively and in order. Where Reacher on the 2000s list is about a man with no past and no attachments, Gentry is a man trying to hold onto his conscience while doing unconscionable things. The 2022 Netflix film with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans is entertaining if shallow. The books are considerably better and considerably more morally complicated than the film suggests.
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Lone Survivor
Marcus Luttrell
In June 2005, a four-man SEAL reconnaissance team was inserted into the mountains of Afghanistan to locate a Taliban commander. Their position was compromised by goat herders. What followed — Operation Red Wings — became the largest loss of life in Navy SEAL history. Marcus Luttrell was the only man who made it out. Luttrell wrote this with Patrick Robinson and the result is both a straight combat memoir and a sustained argument about the rules of engagement that got his teammates killed — a politically honest perspective that the book doesn't soften and that you can agree or disagree with, but which deserves to be engaged seriously. The nonfiction outlier on this list. The 2013 Peter Berg film starring Mark Wahlberg drove enormous readership and is a faithful and brutal adaptation.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
A disgraced Swedish financial journalist is hired by an elderly industrialist to investigate the disappearance of his niece forty years earlier. The journalist's reluctant partner is Lisbeth Salander — a brilliant, damaged, socially catastrophic computer hacker who becomes one of the great characters in popular fiction of the decade. Larsson wrote three novels before dying of a heart attack in 2004 and never saw any of them published. The English translation arrived in America in 2008 and the David Fincher film in 2011 drove enormous dad readership throughout the decade. The Swedish original films with Noomi Rapace are also excellent and worth watching first. The novel is slow for the first hundred pages and then becomes completely impossible to put down. The two sequels maintain the quality, which almost never happens.
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A Delicate Truth
John le Carré
A junior British diplomat named Toby Bell discovers that a covert operation he helped facilitate in Gibraltar three years earlier — a private military contractor hunting a terrorist arms dealer — went badly wrong and that everyone involved is pretending it didn't happen. Le Carré is on the 70s Dad list via Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but this late-career novel is doing something different — the Cold War institutional betrayal he spent fifty years documenting has been privatized, and somehow that makes it worse. Written when le Carré was in his eighties, it's leaner and angrier than his earlier work. Nothing else on this list asks harder questions about what Western governments are actually doing in the war on terror or answers them with less comfort. The most politically uncomfortable novel on this list.
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Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple
Bernadette Fox is a brilliant, reclusive architect living in Seattle who hasn't worked in twenty years, feuds with her neighbors via passive-aggressive email, and outsources her entire life to a virtual assistant in India. When she disappears before a family trip to Antarctica, her fifteen-year-old daughter Bee assembles the story from emails, invoices, psychiatric evaluations, and FBI documents. Semple worked in television and it shows — the comic timing is immaculate, the satirical portrait of Seattle tech culture is sharp without being mean, and the Antarctica third act is genuine adventure. The humor entry on this list, the same slot True Grit holds on the 60s list. The 2019 Cate Blanchett film is decent but misses the book's structural cleverness almost entirely. Read it on a plane and try not to laugh out loud.
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The Revenant
Michael Punke
In 1823, fur trapper Hugh Glass is mauled nearly to death by a grizzly bear in the Dakota Territory. His companions, unwilling to wait for him to die, take his rifle and knife and leave him. Glass spends the next months crawling, then walking, then running several hundred miles across the frontier to find them. Punke based this on a real historical incident and the novel reads like it — spare, cold, and completely unromanticized about what it actually took to survive in the American wilderness in the 1820s. Published in 2002 but almost nobody read it until Alejandro González Iñárritu's 2015 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio drove an enormous wave of dad readership. The film is visually staggering and faithful to the book's spirit. Under 300 pages. The pure adventure entry on this list.
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The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a bomb blast at a New York museum that kills his mother. Walking out of the rubble in shock, he takes a small Dutch masterpiece — a painting of a goldfinch, chained to its perch — and spends the next decade and a half being slowly destroyed by it. Tartt spent eleven years writing this novel and it shows — the prose is some of the most controlled and beautiful in American fiction of the decade, and the plot moves with the momentum of a thriller despite being eight hundred pages of genuinely literary fiction. It won the Pulitzer in 2014 and sold enormously, which means it passed the test of being both serious and readable. The 2019 film is a well-intentioned disaster. Read the book and skip the film entirely. The literary outlier on this list, the same slot Bonfire of the Vanities holds on the 90s list.