Books

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Eighty-eight-year-old Maud is small, frail, and utterly ruthless. When inconvenient people get in her way, she handles them — with the kind of decisive efficiency that only comes with age and absolutely nothing left to lose. Helene Tursten’s darkly comic stories are a love letter to the surprising freedom of extreme old age.

Seventy-six-year-old Caro Spencer, a retired schoolteacher, is placed by her family in a rundown rural nursing home, where neglect and small cruelties threaten to erase her. In a secret journal she fights to hold onto her dignity, her memory, and her sense of self. May Sarton’s spare, searing novel is one of the most honest accounts ever written of institutional aging and the will to remain fully human.

Freshly divorced and adrift, Claire Emerson expects nothing from her sixtieth birthday — until an antique pendant from her grandson awakens a magical calling she never knew she carried. Lydia M. Hawke’s Crone Wars series is a satisfying inversion of the usual story: here the magic arrives with age, and a woman past sixty turns out to be the hero the world has been waiting for.

Yale psychologist Becca Levy has spent decades studying how our beliefs about aging shape the way we age. Her research is remarkable: people with more positive views of their own aging live, on average, 7.5 years longer. Breaking the Age Code is both the science and the practical guide to changing how you think about getting older.

Executive coach and life strategist Dr. Susan R. Meyer gathers the stories of thirty-eight women — from their late sixties into their nineties — who are living with vitality, courage, and joy. Through intimate interviews she draws out eight qualities behind a vibrant later life: resilience, persistence, curiosity, bricolage, fearlessness, legacy, fun, and connection. A warm rebuttal to the idea that women grow less visible or less relevant with age.

Claire ventures alone through the treacherous god realm to rescue her trapped protector before Morok finds the ancient Crone magic hidden there. Book 4 of The Crone Wars.

Penelope Lively, in her late 70s, reflects on memory, reading, objects, and the experience of having lived a long life. Part memoir, part meditation on what persists when so much has changed, this is a writer’s accounting of what age has clarified and what it has taken away.

From 1968 Greenwich Village through five decades of American upheaval, Anita Rappaport comes of age and grows old, sustained by the restorative power of female friendship. As she ages into her seventies, she confronts the title’s question head-on.

Janina is a reclusive older woman living alone in the Polish mountains — a vegetarian, astrologer, and fierce lover of animals who begins to suspect that her missing neighbors are being killed by hunters. Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s darkly comic novel is a murder mystery in which the detective is an aging woman the world has already dismissed.

Geriatrician Louise Aronson spent 25 years caring for older patients before writing this Pulitzer finalist — part memoir, part manifesto — arguing that America’s medical system is failing its elders and that old age deserves to be treated as a distinct, valuable stage of human life, not a problem to be managed.

A novel from Dawn French about Etta, a healthy, happy 68-year-old who gathers her family for a weekend and announces that today is her last day alive. Over the following twenty-four hours the family shares a surprising, darkly funny, and unexpectedly life-affirming day together — a celebration of a life fully lived.

Two women in their 70s have been best friends since childhood, summering on a wild Maine peninsula they have vowed to protect from development. Alice Elliott Dark’s sweeping novel is about female friendship, legacy, secrets, and the question of what we owe the places and people we love most.

Drawn from the lives of fifty women who built rewarding lives on their own terms, Dr. Susan R. Meyer’s guide distills seven key factors for creating the life you deserve — at any age. Her subjects span Fortune 100 executives, entrepreneurs, a home health aide, and a retired saleswoman, and among them have weathered job loss, divorce, illness, and widowhood. Part inspiration, part practical roadmap for reinvention in the second half of life.

Broke, eccentric, seventy-three-year-old Aurora drives to LA chasing a possible inheritance; her estranged, perfectionist forty-three-year-old daughter heads there to spy on her husband. Their quests collide over one chaotic, unexpectedly healing weekend. A sharp comic novel.

Stripped of her magick, Claire alone knows the dark god Morok has infiltrated the Crones—and must recover her power in time to stop him. Book 3 of The Crone Wars urban fantasy series.

The closing book in Lynne Spreen’s Karen Grace series. As Karen travels between friends scattered from Palm Springs to Denver, four love stories unfold around her — a young couple cracking under success, a senior couple who must finally step into the open, a caretaker facing a hard choice, and a workaholic deciding what matters most. Then she heads home to North Dakota, where her own marriage takes a turn she never saw coming.