Books

Laura Spelman, sixty, is told she has terminal lung cancer and resolves to spend what remains working out what her life actually consisted of. What she finds is that the relationships that mattered were with women. Sarton wrote it at sixty-six, and it is still among the frankest novels about dying on your own terms.

Recently widowed and facing the return of advanced breast cancer, Kat Jamison retreats to a Blue Ridge Mountains cabin to decide whether to keep fighting. When a wildfire traps her with two stranded children and their dogs, she must lead them on foot through a burning forest — and discover how fiercely she still wants to live. A taut survival novel anchored by an older woman’s reckoning with mortality.