It has been weeks since I read it, but I can’t get Michael Brendan Dougherty’s debut book, My Father Left Me Ireland, out of my head. Ostensibly, Dougherty has written an epistolary memoir, composed of letters from an American son to the Irish father who abandoned him. But like all great books of the kind – and I believe this one is a masterpiece – it rises far above its raw material to speak to universal concerns: about the human longing for community and a common life, about the link between family and nationhood and meaning, about the simple fact that human beings need fathers, biological and spiritual ones. Lesser hands would suffuse such material and themes with cheap bathos. Dougherty, however, takes the high road of writerly discipline, so that we end up, for example, with this heartrending early account of a trip to an Irish pub with his Irish-American mother and his father: