One of the things that are so incredible about Grey’s Anatomy is how responsive the creative team are when TV magic just happens to fall into their lap. Kevin McKidd’s character Dr. Owen Hunt is a prime example of this. Hunt showed up all the way back in season five, when he was meant to be a quick fling for Sandra Oh’s character, Dr. Cristina Yang. But his story and on-screen energy were compelling enough that the writers kept bringing him back. Hunt is still with us in season 22, working hard to build a stable family life and navigate an emotionally charged workplace.

Hunt has a different background than the majority of the surgeons on Grey’s. He joined our favorite rotating team of doctors after serving as an Army trauma surgeon, so Hunt brought some heavy history with him to process. In Hunt’s early days on the show, his PTSD affected all corners of his life, and he struggled to accept help.

Over the years, we’ve seen Hunt make real efforts to heal from his trauma and PTSD. He’s also pursued a family and fatherhood with an often-remarkable single-mindedness. While, sadly, Hunt is now going through a divorce, he remains a complex character who certainly has flaws, but his growth through all his mistakes shows exactly the kind of heart behind Grey’s Anatomy that keeps us watching.

For Owen Hunt, we’re pulling books, both fiction and nonfiction, on fatherhood, trauma, and growth from as many perspectives as we can find.

If we could get Owen Hunt to read one book, this one would probably be it. Like many people, Hunt returned from his time in the military with PTSD, which affected his life and relationships for years. Hunt was lucky to have a supportive partner in Cristina as he began his healing, but he still struggles with the idea that he should be fixing things himself. Writer and activist Soraya Chemaly might have something to say about that. Her latest book, The Resilience Myth, picks apart the focus on individual effort in recovery. Ever felt like you should push through an injury or just get back to work after some devastating event in your personal life? Chemaly uses journalistic investigation to point out the negative effects that just pushing through can have. So, when we develop communities of support and care, we can help each other flourish, even after tragedies. Chemaly is a great writer and a thorough researcher, and this book is a call to find a community in the best way.

One of Owen Hunt’s defining traits throughout the show is his quest to be a father. In fact, it’s the thing that derails more than one of his relationships. But contemporary fatherhood looks very different than it did even at the beginning of Hunt’s tenure on the show. What does it mean to be a dad in the 21st century? Kevin Maguire is trying to figure it out and help other fathers along the way. His popular newsletter, with the same name as this book, has more than 21,000 subscribers, mostly dads who hope to do a bit better for their kids than whatever the status quo was for them. In the latest seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, Hunt has started the family he desired so much at first, but there is no reason he can’t still learn and grow and become the dad his kids deserve.

If Hamnet made you tear up a bit, you’re in good company here. And we’d guess more heart-wrenching prose is in store in O’Farrell’s next novel, Land. In this upcoming book, she follows ​​Tomás and Liam, a cartographer and his son tasked with mapping Ireland under British rule. Tomás wants his maps to be a remembrance of all the suffering the Irish experienced under British occupation, and Liam helps however he can. But then something changes Tomás, and Liam is left scrambling, knowing British soldiers could show up at any time. We can’t be too certain of exactly what happens yet, but we do know this new book from O’Farrell covers generations of trauma and family healing through the lens of a boy, his father, and the land they love — exactly the ticket for Hunt.

You may know Roy Wood Jr. from The Daily Show, but he’s ready to reveal lots of childhood details in this touching (and still funny!) memoir. While Wood and Hunt have lived different lives, they are both interested in the influence fathers have on young lives. This memoir, styled as a letter to Wood’s own son, does talk about his biological father. But it’s also a touching deep dive into the ways fatherhood can mean so many things. It’s a lovely, stirring, often-hilarious tribute to many men in Wood’s life, though Wood doesn’t neglect his mother’s impact on his growth and success either. It’s a wonderful book that considers the impact fathers have on everyone in their orbit and beyond.

Working with family is always risky, as Hunt well knows, especially when everyone is used to being the smartest person in the room. Nell Young spent years working on maps with her father before he fired her after what seemed to her a very low-stakes argument over a worthless map. So, when her dad winds up dead with a copy of that same seemingly worthless map, Nell investigates her way into a very high-stakes magical world. This one is mostly an entertaining mystery romp, but we do think the family stress would resonate with Hunt.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir is just stunning. Because his father was considered a political dissident in their native Libya, Hisham Matar mostly grew up in exile. But that didn’t keep the family safe. Matar’s father was kidnapped off the streets of Cairo when Matar was 19. The rest of the family spent decades wondering what had happened to him. Eventually, Matar goes back to Libya. He and his family have never had clarity about what happened to his father, but this chronicle is more about interrogating masculinity, violence, and fatherhood. Matar knows the closest thing to closure he’s likely to find is internal, and his search for that hope is certainly a feat.

This novel, loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic Russian novel The Brothers Karamazov, is one of the most incredible family portraits we’ve ever read, and it’s got baseball, PTSD, and intense sibling relationships. There are the parents: devoutly Seventh-Day Adventist mom Laura and prickly, disappointed baseball player father Hugh Chance. Then comes a series of brothers: Everett, Peter, Irwin, and Kade. They also have a set of twin sisters, the youngest of the crew. That may feel like a lot of characters to keep track of at first, but they’re each painted so vividly that you won’t get lost. It is a bit hard to sum up the plot, as we’re with the Chance family for decades through injuries, conflicts, joy, PTSD, and more. But the family relationships — and their efforts to draw one another closer, and push one another away in turn — are the point, and wow, are they done well.