Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chronicles of a Desperate Dad | 2006 | Mark Richards | Buy |
| 2 | Walking Shorts: 25 Laugh-out-Loud short stories | 2018 | Mark Richards | Buy |
| 3 | Pepper: Tales of a Family Dog… | 2020 | Mark Richards | Buy |
Mark Richards published his first book, Chronicles of a Desperate Dad, in 2006. It is a collection that draws on the same fatherhood material he would return to across his career, written with the wry, self-aware humour that defines his non-fiction voice.
Walking Shorts, from 2018, collects 25 short comic pieces and sits close to the territory of his Father, Son walking memoirs, suggesting that the hiking books grew partly out of a longer engagement with short-form comic writing. Pepper, published in 2020, is a collection of stories about a family dog, a format that lets Richards combine the domestic warmth of his fatherhood writing with the kind of animal observation that many readers find immediately appealing.
The three collections span nearly fifteen years and show a writer who has kept returning to short forms throughout a career that also includes crime novels and book-length non-fiction. They work well as an introduction to Richards’s voice before committing to the longer Brady series.