Books

At fifty, Maria Leonard Olsen had drunk her way out of a twenty-five-year marriage, put every egg in the motherhood basket, and willfully derailed a successful law career. Adrift, she gave herself a birthday assignment: fifty things she had never done before.

The first half of the book is why she needed the list. The second half works through it — adventure, travel, spirituality, physical challenge — with self-reflection questions after each. Olsen is a Washington DC lawyer, journalist and recovery advocate, and she is unsparing about the wreckage that came first.

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.

Antonia Vega, an immigrant writer and newly retired English professor, has barely begun to grieve her husband’s sudden death when her unpredictable sister disappears and a pregnant, undocumented teenager appears on her Vermont doorstep. Julia Alvarez’s first adult novel in almost fifteen years asks what we owe one another in a broken world—and how a woman remakes a life on her own.

We’re often told to fear ageing — to shrink, quieten down, disappear a little. Jo Blackwell’s answer, written the year she approached 65, is that midlife is where the truth about ageing begins. Drawing on research and the lived experience of women in their fifties, sixties and seventies, she walks through confidence, menopause, ageist assumptions absorbed over a lifetime, and roles that no longer fit — without any pressure to reinvent yourself or “fix” what isn’t broken.

Warm, evidence-informed, and firmly on your side.

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.

When Janice Mason Steeves surveyed 138 artists aged 59 to 79 about their journeys into art, a pattern emerged: later life, far from being a barrier to creativity, can be an ideal time to begin. Weaving their stories with her own path from psychology to an international painting career, Steeves offers practical guidance and encouragement for anyone drawn to a creative life after 50.

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.

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Photographer Jo Blackwell put that question to hundreds of women and photographed 166 of them exactly as they are — no make-up, no styling, no filters — each portrait paired with the woman’s own words about growing older, being seen, and letting go of unrealistic expectations. Featured by the BBC, it is not a glossy “embrace ageing” book; it is a quiet, truthful record of older faces, and an argument that every one of them is worth looking at.

Why it’s here: The portraits begin at forty, not fifty — but the project’s whole subject is the visibility and self-acceptance the second half of life demands, and its honest older faces are the point.