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.

Essays on being a mature woman still looking for a life of purpose while popular culture treats her as finished. Weldon is funny about invisibility without letting anyone off the hook for it. Winner of the Gilda Prize.

Sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain why women experience burnout differently than men, and offer science-backed strategies for completing the stress cycle and recovering your wellbeing. Essential for women who have spent decades caregiving, working, and putting themselves last.

Everything is tickety-boo at The Green Meadows retirement village until Cynthia’s dear friend accidentally witnesses a murder and, in shock, cannot remember a thing. With a security guard and a young detective in tow, Cynthia sets about reconstructing what he saw before the killer reaches the next name on the list. Book two, pitched squarely at the Thursday Murder Club reader: senior sleuths, real friendship, and a body that has gone missing.

Karen Grace is far from home and newly unemployed when she agrees to take an elderly neighbor on one last road trip in a vintage RV. Along the way she confronts the truth about her marriage and begins reinventing her life at fifty. First book in the later-in-life Dakota Blues series.

Brené Brown’s landmark work on vulnerability — how the willingness to be seen, to take risks, and to embrace imperfection is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, and creativity. Transformative for women who have spent decades in shame-driven perfectionism.

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.

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.

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.

Having broken free at fifty to start a new life, Karen Grace lands in Florida, camping out with friends and facing fresh relationships and setbacks. The sequel to Dakota Blues (Book 2) continues the later-in-life arc of reinvention.

The sequel to Killers of a Certain Age. Four women assassins, retired and comprehensively underestimated, are pulled back in, and their invisibility to everyone under fifty is once again the sharpest weapon they have.

Lore Segal, writing in her late 80s, collects stories about a group of elderly New Yorkers who meet regularly for lunch and grapple together with the losses and indignities of old age. Funny, exact, and utterly unsentimental — one of the most honest books written about what being old actually feels like.

Newly widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves into a genteel London residential hotel and slowly finds her footing among the other residents — elderly people managing loneliness, dignity, and the small cruelties of age with varying degrees of grace. Elizabeth Taylor’s 1971 novel is warm, mordant, and more subversive than it first appears.

Olive Kitteridge is older now, and a little softer — though not much. In a second cycle of linked stories set in coastal Maine, Elizabeth Strout returns to her most beloved character and finds new reserves of tenderness and humor in a woman who has lived long enough to know what she has been wrong about.

Sent by a land-hungry boss to befriend ninety-two-year-old rancher Sydelle Hammer, twenty-two-year-old Bee Wells finds an unlikely, genuine friendship instead. When shady deals and a stroke put Sydelle at risk, Bee must take a stand for the land, her friend, and herself.

Why it’s here: Ninety-two-year-old Sydelle is the novel’s beating heart — fierce, land-rooted, and refusing to be managed out of her own life.

Four colleagues on the verge of retirement circle each other through a London autumn, each carrying a private interior life invisible to the others. Barbara Pym’s understated novel is a dark comedy of aging, loneliness, and connection — and a quiet argument for the dignity of unremarkable lives.

Psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach offers radical acceptance — of ourselves, our bodies, our pain — as the foundation of healing and freedom. Essential for women who have spent decades judging themselves and are ready to stop.

When a possible Caravaggio and its curator vanish from a San Francisco museum, cynical lawyer Zara and her scam-prone sister Lilly — two seasoned, sharp-tongued sleuths — give chase from California to a barn in Alsace, a wartime journal in hand.

A practical and emotional guide for women who find themselves suddenly single after 50 — whether through divorce, widowhood, or the end of a long-term relationship. Addresses finances, housing, identity, dating, and rebuilding a life.

Olive Kitteridge, now ninety, and Lucy Barton, in her sixties, spend a Maine winter telling each other the unrecorded lives of women they have known. A novel about whether an ordinary life adds up to anything, asked by two people close enough to the end to want an answer.

The definitive guide for families caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s or other dementias. Practical, compassionate, and comprehensive — a must-have for the millions of women who are dementia caregivers, usually for a parent or spouse.

A retired FBI agent and three fellow widows investigate a death the police have written off. From Sibylline Press, which publishes women authors over fifty exclusively, and it shows in who gets to be competent.

Recently widowed and facing a future she describes as a dreary blur, Cynthia Peabody cannot sleep. Meditating against the insomnia, she finds a portal in her back garden through which her dreams turn inconveniently real — starting with a dog. The teenager next door offers to walk it, and the friendship that follows does more to shift Cynthia out of her grumpiness than any of the dreaming. Book one of two, and magical realism used to get at complicated grief rather than to avoid it.

A woman approaching 60 takes in her late best friend’s enormous Great Dane, and the dog becomes the occasion for a meditation on grief, friendship, and what we owe the dead. Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award-winning novel is slim, precise, and quietly devastating.