Fatherhood: The Truth
by Marcus Berkmann
Vermillion £10.99, pp278

The truth about parenthood comes to parents in all sorts of unwieldy, unwelcome shapes and is unlikely to be contained inside one book.

If it was, it would prove pretty hard to swallow. So instead, Marcus Berkmann has a clean bash at nailing the key myths, while offering a few jokes to lighten the load necessarily bearing down on someone who is waiting to become a father. In certain respects, this guide to daddydom is actually a generation behind the latest books available to pregnant women. Many of these are now excoriating in their frankness and have dispensed entirely with the jocular tone once intended to encourage readers on the way to labour day.

Perhaps Berkmann's book will itself prove to be the tentative father of a new breed of honest, blokeish approaches to his subject, but his book still belongs to the era of the coercive, funny-but-true birth manual. There is insight here, though. Berkmann notes, for instance, that the list a new father is given for the traditional ring-round following the birth will prioritise all the mother's relatives and friends.

This, he says, is due to jealousy: 'Calling everyone with the good news is much more fun than what she has just gone through.'

He also understands the power struggle that may well have already begun.

'Despite the fact you have done nothing these nine months, the baby is 50 per cent you. Some mothers never forgive the father for this.' But the tone of the guide is caring, too. While '1,001 things can go wrong', it concedes, very few are likely to, and once the midwife has left: 'Given a little luck, you and your partner should have nothing more to show for all this effort than an empty room and a small baby.'