In Your Heart

Some days it seems that all one has to do to write a book (and get it published and get it positive attention) is to start by thinking about your father. Or, more exactly, how your father influences your life.

Steve McKee went looking into his father's heart when his own heart betrayed him. It is genetics — his father died of a heart attack when he was 16 &mash; and the battle against that takes readers into his head via the memoir of what his father's life and death have meant for him in "My Father's Heart."

And from the fiction side of the aisle we have the story of a girl's hunt for her father. Unwed but pregnant Wilhemina Upton decides to discover the secret of her father as a psychological nesting tack in preparation for the birth of her child. What she finds, what Lauren Groff reveals in her first novel, "Monsters of Templeton," is how the lost relationship of father and daughter (and some surrealistic touches) define a daughter and then a grandchild.

** Each dad is a pebble flung into a pond, circles of radiating influence well beyond where he plops. **