Books

After divorce upended the life she thought she’d have, Teri M. Brown climbed onto the back of a tandem bicycle and set out with her husband Bruce to pedal across the United States — from Astoria, Oregon to Washington, DC — at a steady 10.4 miles per hour. Part memoir, part motivational guide, the book unfolds as ten hard-won “rules” drawn from winding roads, unexpected detours, and the strangers who became part of the story. Each chapter pairs a personal anecdote with reflective prompts, inviting readers to map their own second-act adventures. An award-winning inspirational memoir about resilience, reinvention, and discovering what you’re capable of when you stop coasting.

Elizabeth White was a high-achieving professional when financial catastrophe hit in her 50s. Her unflinching account of downward mobility, shame, and survival is essential reading for the millions of older women navigating economic insecurity — and a practical call for structural change.

The threads of the sisterhood’s magical struggle converge toward a reckoning. Book 3 of The Obsidian Sisterhood.

Newly-awakened Crone Claire Emerson races the clock to gather the remaining Crones and master her elemental magic as the dark Mages close in. Book 2 of The Crone Wars, an urban fantasy where a woman’s power arrives after fifty.

A practical guide to navigating midlife and beyond through creativity and reinvention, from an author who has lived it into her seventies.

Why it’s here: Not a personal narrative but a resource for creative reinvention in the second half of life — the stage CroneHub is built for.

Ted and Marina Diamond set out to build the ideal military family — disciplined, close, unbreakable — but years of upheaval, rigid rules, and quiet violence fray the bonds and breed secrets. A grandchild’s curiosity finally forces a reckoning.

Why it’s here: Matriarch Marina reckons, in her later years, with the true cost of the ‘perfect’ family she helped build — an older woman’s long view of love and damage.

Jane Juska was a fearless explorer who set off to live an erotic adventure in her sixties and then write about it. She was a Berkeley, CA woman who placed an ad in the New York Review of Books personal section, saying she wanted to make love again before she died, and letting prospective partners know which literary figures she was prepared to discuss as foreplay.

She traveled to New York multiple times, meeting prospective lovers and capturing the stories in her book. Juska was a witty and unsinkable woman who would have been a great neighbor or dinner companion – although she seemed to be without fellow women travelers in her adventures. She broke through society’s image of what an older woman could be at a time when few women lived that life and almost no one wrote about it. A brave and valuable tale.

On the day of Japan’s 1945 surrender, three men — an American missionary, a US gunner’s mate, and a local Chinese soldier — make a pact to return in death, each year, to the village where they survived the war. Seventy years on, their souls reconvene, still bound by the woman each of them loved: Ah Yan, called Swallow, who endured unspeakable atrocities and met them with grace and dignity. As their memories converge, the shape of her extraordinary life comes into view.

Why it’s here: Though narrated by the three men who loved her, the novel is ultimately the portrait of one woman’s lifelong endurance and dignity — her story reclaimed from the men who remember it.

On a beach in British Columbia, a writer named Ruth finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up from the 2011 tsunami. Inside is the diary of Nao, a Japanese teenager desperate to be understood, and each page pulls Ruth — and the reader — deeper into the mystery of Nao’s life. Weaving across continents and decades, Ruth Ozeki’s novel is a meditation on time, connection, and our shared humanity.

Why it’s here: One of the book’s two narrators is a teenage girl, but the other is Ruth, a midlife woman writer whose own reckoning with meaning and mortality anchors the story.

The Obsidian sisterhood is drawn deeper into conflict as their magical entanglements grow more dangerous. Book 2 of The Obsidian Sisterhood.

Ma-Nee Chacaby was born into poverty on a remote Ojibwa-Cree reserve in Ontario, survived abuse and addiction, and came out as a lesbian elder at a time when her community had no name for what she was. Her autobiography is a story of survival, identity, and the power of Two-Spirit tradition — told with unflinching honesty by an elder who refused to disappear.

A sixty-nine-year-old former nun and two-time black belt is drawn into a web of dark magic and obligation. Book 1 of The Obsidian Sisterhood, an urban fantasy proving age is no barrier to power.

After a decades-long estrangement, Carla Seaquist sets out four decades later to repair the bond with her aging mother, one kitchen-table conversation at a time. A memoir of late reconciliation.

Princesses Neve, Della, and Bry have lived their happily-ever-after in the kingdom of Foreverness for thirty years — until the king’s sudden death sends each on a quest that shatters the illusion of royal perfection. A fantasy of midlife rebellion and new legends.

Why it’s here: Its three heroines are women well past the fairy-tale ending, rebelling and remaking their lives in midlife — an older-women’s story in fairy-tale dress.

In this groundbreaking anthology, Black women writers, artists, and activists reflect on midlife with honesty, humor, and complexity. Edited by Carleen Brice, the collection centers voices that are too rarely heard in mainstream conversations about aging — bringing race, joy, grief, and reinvention together on the same page.

Gerontologist Tracey Gendron, who chairs the Department of Gerontology at Virginia Commonwealth University, argues that ageism is the most normalized of all prejudices — one that shapes how we treat others and how we see our own aging. Grounded in research but written for a general reader, the book is a clear-eyed guide to recognizing age bias and beginning to unlearn it.

Joan Price bills herself as the “senior sexpert,” a phrase that captures her late life career as an advocate for senior sexuality and the author of several non-fiction books on the subject. In Ageless Erotica, Price has collected well-written short stories about eroticism in later life, by both men and women. These stories cover a wide range of sexual orientation, gender identification, and realism alongside magic. All of the stories share a joy in the bodies we have now: Exploring them, rediscovering them, longing to share them.

This is one of the few books I am including that also has work by men. When you read it, pay attention to how the stories differ by gender – and how much they have in common. The notes about authors at the end of the book provide many ways to explore and connect with people who celebrate sexuality throughout our lives.

A companion collection in the Menopausal Superheroes series, bundling two interlude novellas and a set of short stories. It goes behind and between the novels to deepen the world of Patricia the Lizard Woman, Fuerte, Flygirl, and Dr. Cindy Liu, exploring what it means to be a hero at any age or stage of life.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that aging is not a biological fate but a cultural construction — that we are “aged by culture” long before our bodies slow down. This rigorous, impassioned book gives women the intellectual tools to identify and resist the ageism that shapes how we see ourselves and each other.

Social gerontologist Jeanette Leardi makes the case that later life is a time of growth, purpose, and possibility, not inevitable decline. Drawing on research, vivid comparisons, and personal stories, she exposes the forces that frame aging as loss and offers practical strategies for aging with dignity and agency.

Raymond Jetson examines the experience of aging through a Black American lens — the particular vulnerabilities, strengths, and communal resources that shape how Black elders grow old in a country that has never treated them equally. A frank and necessary perspective on race, age, and dignity.

Naturally it’s not just women who enjoy making love with men over fifty; I’m sure there are men buying this book too!

But for a woman who makes love with a man of a certain age, this book provides useful insights to the ways men’s sexuality changes over time. The main theme of the book is that men’s sexual responses slow with the years. Men take longer to arouse after fifty, and in fact become more like us women in that regard. It is our turn to be patient and encouraging. But there are many more specifics here as well, and the book is worth reading for the helpful hints it provides.

Divorced at sixty-three, Jessie Woodley inherits a Colorado cabin and a trust — but only by completing a series of cryptic tasks set by a watchful lawyer she’s dangerously drawn to. Book 1 of the Lovesong Encore later-in-life romance series.

All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women is a hugely satisfying collection edited by Enid Shomer and published by Carolina Wren Press.

It’s intriguing in part because the book is divided by the age of the poets and their subjects.
Part I, The Discovery of Sex, is all about first longing.
Part II, The Ordinary Day Begins, is about sex in the years of active motherhood.
Part III, When this Old Body, is of course my favorite and the part I read first.

“And suddenly, again, I want the long road of your thigh,” writes Jane Hirshfield of the desire that comes in long knowing.

“our bodies move and join / unbearably. / your face above me / is the face of all the gods / and beautiful demons,” writes Lenore Kandel, reminding us of the timelessness of lust.

“Neither of them was young. His beard was gray… But they kissed lavish kisses like the ocean in the early morning… We couldn’t look away,” writes Ellen Bass about a couple reunited at the Portland airport. These fine poems capture what it is to be a woman in love with life across its full span.