Fatherhood cover art

Fatherhood

A History of Love and Power

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Fatherhood

By: Augustine Sedgewick
Narrated by: Feodor Chin
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

An Economist, GQ and Times Book of the Year 2025

An ambitious history of masculinity and family, from the Bronze Age to the modern day, Fatherhood dares to offer a more caring and affirmative vision of the roles men currently play in society.


'Superbly intelligent . . . a rewarding Sapiens-style big history' - The Sunday Times

'A lightness of touch that recalls Bill Bryson or Craig Brown at their non-fiction best' - The Observer

What is fatherhood, and where did it come from? How has the role of men in families and society changed across thousands of years? What does the history of fatherhood reveal about what it means to be a dad today?

From the anxious philosophers of ancient Athens and Henry VIII’s obsessive quest for an heir, to Charles Darwin’s theories of human origins, Bob Dylan’s take down of ‘The Man’, and beyond, Sedgewick shows how successive generations of men have shaped our understanding of what it means to be and have a father, and in turn our ideas of who we are, where we come from and what we are capable of.

Civilization Cultural & Regional Fatherhood Parenting & Families Relationships World Inspiring

Listeners also enjoyed...

Peak Human cover art
Lost Boys cover art
The Optimist cover art
Strangers and Intimates cover art
Baltic cover art
Homo Criminalis cover art
Our Brains, Our Selves cover art
I, Claudius cover art
Superbloom cover art
Prisoners of Geography cover art
Venice cover art
The Power and the Money cover art
The AI Mirror cover art
Infantilised cover art
No Trade Is Free cover art
The Great Mental Models cover art

Critic reviews

An invigorating, impressively researched and honest read. Anyone doing the work of dismantling and reframing the heavy role of the father will find something here (Raymond Antrobus, author of Signs, Music)
An engrossing chronicle of fatherhood . . . studious research and literary agility makes Fatherhood a deeply fascinating and strikingly humane read.
A winsome and erudite study of patriarchy . . . in elegant, evocative prose. Fatherhood is a fresh and insightful meditation on the paternal dilemma.
Intelligent . . . The author is an undeniably talented prose stylist with estimable dot-connecting abilities.
'A richly absorbing piece of history embedded in a wealth of wonderful storytelling. A pleasure to read’ - Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments (Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City)
Absorbing, rigorous, and profoundly moving, Fatherhood is an exquisite narrative history that offers new ways of thinking about masculinity and the modern family (Kate Bolick, author of Spinster)
Examines not only recent shifts, but the continuous process of change that runs through the centuries . . . a fascinating survey and a book with a particular relevance today.
Explains the surprising roots of our modern masculinity crisis.
Artfully examined . . . highly informative . . . Shows that the hidden truth of fatherhood and masculinity is that they are concepts we make and can be remade.
When Robert Collins reviewed Fatherhood, he called it “superbly intelligent”. I’m inclined to agree
An American scholar describes how thinking about dads has changed over time
No reviews yet