Books

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.

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.

Unable to shake a midlife emptiness, Janet Wilson and her husband drive 25,000 miles across Africa; through tragedy and hardship they transform a decades-long marriage into deeper trust. A later-life story of reinvention.

Joan Price writes candidly about sexuality after sixty — desire, dating, body changes, and intimacy. Warm, funny, and deeply affirming for any woman wondering if her erotic life is over. It is not.

In this Taschen book (if you don’t know Benedikt Tashen’s outstanding publishing house, you should) Liz Earls talks of divorce, turning fifty and how these events changed her view of the world. If you are a woman who enjoys younger men, either to look at or to embrace, this book may be a great motivator for your writing.  Liz Earls shares sexy explicit photographs of her adventures with younger men in this uninhibited (and VERY Not Safe For Work)  collection.  Her verve is unmistakable.

Book two of the Veil of Time series. Maggie has built a careful, predictable life back in the present, but the past has not finished with her. A sudden vision pulls her through time again, into a world of ancient power and shifting loyalties — and back to Fergus, the warrior prince she never forgot. Political tension is rising, a dangerous alliance threatens his family, and her hold on the past is more fragile than before; she has to decide how much she will risk for a love that crosses centuries.

Why it’s here: Historical fantasy rather than a story of later life, published by Sibylline Digital First — women authors over 50. It belongs here for its middle book’s question, which is a familiar one after fifty: whether the safe, predictable life you assembled is the one you actually want.

Book one of the Veil of Time series. After losing her daughter, Maggie retreats to the Scottish countryside and the shadow of ancient Dunadd Fort. When she stops taking the medication that has controlled her seizures — and dulled her feelings — she begins slipping into another time, where the ruined fort stands whole and the past is alive. Taken in at the court of Queen Brighde by Fergus, a grieving prince, she finds feelings stirring that she thought were finished, and a life she does not want to leave. With a life-altering surgery waiting in the present, she has to choose between the world she knows and the one that feels like home.

Why it’s here: A time-slip romance rather than a book about aging, from Sibylline Digital First, whose list is women authors over 50. It earns its place as a story about a woman rebuilding after devastating loss and discovering that desire, purpose and a second life were never actually behind her.

At fifty-eight, just out of her longest relationship, Carolyn Lee Arnold decided not to look for a partner but to gather data — fifty first dates, tracked and reflected on, to work out what she actually wanted rather than what she had settled for twice before.

What follows is candid about desire, about dating as an older woman in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about the unexpected discovery that the project itself was the point.

When we write about sex, we often focus on the emotion it evokes – which is important and entirely understandable. Writing about sex itself, as a physical and sensory experience, it is easy to stumble into mechanistic descriptions. But in Free Fall, Rae Padilla writes sex scenes of unparalleled power and immediacy. Her language is gorgeous and her skill with a sentence will stop you cold. She immerses us in the visceral experience of this late life love affair, and then explores the countervailing pull of the narrator’s responsibilities to career and to an immensely demanding family life. If you have been ambushed by lust in your ripe years, if your desire has gone off like fireworks in the lives of the people around you, this story is sure to resonate. Free Fall is a book to relish first of all, and then to study for its lessons about the creative process. This book is a master course in writing about ripe love.

A financial guide for women divorcing after fifty, when there is less time to recover and the marital estate is usually the whole retirement plan. Settlement negotiation, asset division, and rebuilding on one income.

In 1964 Vermont, recently widowed city Democrat Rose Mayer and taciturn Republican farmer Percy Mendell clash the moment they meet — and, across the turning seasons, fall into an unexpected love. An award-winning novel about second chances at sixty-four.

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.

Fifty-two true accounts from people who had decided their romantic chapter was closed — widowed, divorced, discouraged, or simply tired of looking. Relationship coach Nancy Ripp White collects the meetings that happened anyway: a laundry room, a high-school flame resurfacing, a message arriving on an ordinary Tuesday. What runs through all of them is what she argues younger love rarely teaches — depth, clarity, gratitude, and a sharp sense of what time is worth.

The complications are here too, not smoothed over: adult children with opinions, blended families, grief that has not finished, independence nobody wants to hand back. Almost every story opens the same way — “I wasn’t looking” — and White’s point is that they were living, and love met them there.

Sarah Durham, a widowed theatre producer in her sixties, falls unexpectedly and humiliatingly in love, and has to reckon with desire in a body the world has stopped looking at. Lessing wrote it at seventy-seven and refuses every consolation the plot invites.

Hollywood director Steve McNaught retreats to his ancestral village in rural Scotland and is eyed with suspicion — not least by ex-hippy midwife Georgie. Their sparky romance falters when he threatens to turn the town into a film set, until he returns, sober, with a film that spills its secrets.

Why it’s here: Georgie, a seasoned village midwife, is the sharp, unsentimental heart of the story — an older woman entirely on her own terms.

At sixty, long-married psychotherapist Leah Fisher negotiates a year-long ‘marriage sabbatical’ of solo global travel — an alternative to gray divorce, and a reclaiming of self within a marriage.

Recovering from surgery in a New York hospital, Lucy Barton wakes to find her estranged mother at her bedside after years of silence. As they talk, Lucy revisits her impoverished rural childhood, her escape to the city, and the marriage and children she has since made — and begins to doubt the life she built, wondering what has been lost and what is still to be found. From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge, it is a spare, luminous story of mothers and daughters.

Why it’s here: Lucy is younger in the hospital scenes, but she narrates as an older woman looking back — a reckoning with memory, motherhood, and the past that lands differently with age.

After her father’s death and divorce from her husband of two decades, Rachel leaves a thirty-year career and navigates a year of disastrous midlife dating — dark, wry, and ultimately hopeful.

Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel gave us Olive Kitteridge, the prickly, difficult, deeply alive retired schoolteacher of Crosby, Maine — a woman who cannot help offending people and cannot stop caring about them. In thirteen linked stories spanning decades, Olive becomes one of American fiction’s most unforgettable older women.

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.

The foundational text on grief and the stages that have helped millions of people understand their own mourning. Essential for women navigating loss of parents, spouses, health, identity, and roles that often cluster in midlife.

Sixty-something Celeste Waterbury escapes to the desert to leave a failing marriage behind, then finds herself unsettled by her attraction to the rugged Sedona contractor she hires. Book 2 of the Sedona Silver Romances.

Peg sells beachfront homes, raises two kids, and holds her life together with duct tape and dark humor. What she can’t manage is menopause, divorce, and an ex who flirts with women half her age. As hot flashes and brain fog upend her world, Peg unravels in hilarious, inconvenient ways, and begins to suspect her breakdown might also be a breakthrough.

In the fictional Northern California city of San Andreas de Pacifico, the ground is literally unstable — and so are the people in these twelve linked love stories. A long-married couple scales a cemetery wall to reignite their passion; an old man losing himself to dementia finds an abandoned baby; a struggling writer finds freedom trying to rescue a beached whale. Award-winning author Ericka Lutz (The Edge of Maybe) writes with an unflinching, lyrical voice about connection, vulnerability, and the fault lines beneath ordinary lives.

Why it’s here: This collection spans the whole arc of a life rather than focusing only on older women, but its older characters — the assisted-living residents, the man facing dementia, the women reaching late in life for passion and meaning — and its themes of mortality, reinvention, and connection speak directly to a second-half-of-life reader.