Best Dad Books in Order

The Best Dad books are built out of family life, not big plot twists. They come from the weekly columns Mark Richards started writing in 2003, and that origin matters. These books are episodic by design. Each piece catches one argument, one school event, one ridiculous misunderstanding, one parenting wobble, or one moment of unexpected sweetness, then moves on before life throws the next thing at the family.

At the centre is a household of five, mum, dad, and three children, with all the noise, mess, affection, and low-level panic that arrangement tends to bring with it. Best Dad, the Beginning introduces that world and the tone Richards uses to tell it. The Swimming Pool Years then digs into the early stretch, when the children are still young and the problems are things like party bags, nativity plays, family changing rooms, and the small daily battles that somehow feel enormous when you are living them.

Small disasters are the point.

What makes the series work is that Richards never writes as if he has cracked the code of perfect parenting. Quite the opposite. He is usually tired, baffled, outnumbered, or trying to apply a sensible rule that collapses the second real children get involved. That gives the books their comic energy. The jokes are there, but so is the recognition factor. Anyone who has lived in a busy family, as a parent, a child, or both, will recognise the strange mix of love and exasperation that drives the stories.

As the books move forward, the children grow up, and that gives the series a quiet long arc. What starts with primary-school chaos gradually shifts toward hormones, teenage moods, exams, relationships, and the long business of children becoming more independent. Because the books are drawn from columns written over time, readers get that change in small, believable steps rather than in one big dramatic leap. The result is less like a novel and more like opening the family photo box and finding the funny stories written on the back.

Richards also keeps one eye on the adults. Marriage, money, work, pride, and the need for five quiet minutes all have their place here. He can be very funny about the absurdity of modern family life, but he is just as interested in how families hold together through repetition, compromise, and the occasional surrender. There is affection in these books, but not mushiness. He is too honest for that.

If you like companion books, Chronicles of a Desperate Dad sits comfortably beside this series, and Pepper extends the same family world through the life of the family's dog. But the core of Best Dad is simple. It is about the years when children are growing up under your nose, the days feel chaotic while they are happening, and then one day you realise those ordinary moments were the story all along.