After reading a number of excellent books on motherhood over the last couple of years, it was refreshing to read a broader view of parenthood and a (positive) account of the wonder of fatherhood. I thoroughly enjoyed this one - I happened to pick it up at exactly the right time for me (I read much of it whilst walking loops around the living room to settle a three-month-old…) but there’s also something about Zambra’s writing that I love, a seam of darkly quirky irreverence threading through the book that perfectly chimes with my sense of humour.

As a mix of personal essays and fictional pieces, there’s no plot, but (perhaps with the exception of The Boy With No Dad) they come together into a cohesive account of navigating fatherhood, the wonders and absurdities of watching a small child grow and develop and how that can change how we, as adults, look at the world and ourselves. There are musings throughout about raising a child in a country not your own and all the various implications in terms of family relationships, a sense of identity and belonging, and language - unsurprisingly, I very much appreciated these.

I have to mention the piece French for Beginners - we also have the referenced children’s book at home and I find it truly wonderful to think that two strangers on opposite sides of the world, a Chilean in Mexico and a Franco-Scot in New Zealand, both spend plenty of time reading their respective toddlers the same French translation of the same story. There’s a comfort to stumbling across such a completely minor but unexpectedly shared experience.

A warm, reflective and quietly quirky account of the wonders and amusing absurdities of an attentive fatherhood and embracing changes in perspective offered up by small children.