Books

A psychotherapist’s memoir of a long, bruising divorce and custody battle with a wealthy ex — a high-stakes fight that surfaces old wounds and, ultimately, a path to healing.

The fourth Lady Astronaut novel returns to Elma York on the first permanent Mars base, where a covered-up disaster and the hard work of building a fair society off-world test the colony — and her.

Why it’s here: The continuing arc of Kowal’s Lady Astronaut, whose protagonist ages from young pilot toward the 63-year-old astronaut of the series’ origin story — a long view of one woman’s life in science and space.

Neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi reveals how menopause reshapes the brain and what women can do to protect their cognitive health. Groundbreaking and empowering.

Dr. Jen Gunter cuts through menopause misinformation with science, humor, and feminist fire. Tackles HRT, bone health, cardiovascular risk, and medical neglect of menopausal women.

Dr. Mary Claire Haver delivers a comprehensive, evidence-based guide to perimenopause and menopause — hormones, nutrition, sleep, strength training, and mental health.

In 1880, immigrants flock to the fictional Isle of Touperdu — among them a New Orleans chef and Gwennoelle Duday, matriarch of a rackety family of witches. As both families dig in, a haunting question trails them: is the island’s promise a lie?

Why it’s here: At its heart is Gwennoelle, an aging matriarch anchoring a sweeping tale of outsiders and belonging.

At 72, the widow Mary Delany picked up a pair of scissors and a piece of black paper and invented an entirely new art form — the paper mosaic. Molly Peacock’s biography of this forgotten Georgian genius is also a meditation on late-life creativity: what becomes possible when the social obligations of a lifetime finally lift.

Donna Henes proposes to expand the traditional pagan stages of a woman’s life (Maiden, Mother, Crone) to a four-stage schema, like the seasons of the year, and celebrates the third, Queen, phase of her life in this inspiring book.

Running alongside the events of The Fated Sky, this installment shifts to astronaut Nicole Wargin — former WASP pilot, governor’s wife, and reluctant spy — as she hunts a saboteur threatening the Moon colony while Earth First terrorism escalates back home.

Why it’s here: Its narrator, Nicole, is a seasoned older astronaut reckoning with power, a political marriage, and a body that doesn’t always cooperate — an unusually rich portrait of a capable woman in the second half of life.

Dr. Ogden was a professional who wrote with wisdom and compassion about how women reclaim their sexuality after midlife, in spite of social pressures, and in many cases in spite of a history of abuse. She has spent a lifetime developing her understanding of how we construct meaning about our sexuality and how we develop our sexual relationships. Readers of this book gain the benefit of her insights. Our relationships with ourselves are her ultimate concern.

Intimacy coach Nathalie Dewalhens names a new archetype — the Sensual Crone — for the woman whose desire didn’t vanish at menopause but grew weirder, wilder, and more interesting. Finished on her sixtieth birthday, this frank, unsugarcoated set of five truths runs from vaginal atrophy to neo-tantra to a hotel room in Bruges, insisting that erotic life after reproduction is a beginning, not an epilogue.

Recovering from divorce, an executive coach accepts an invitation to Ecuador and meets a sixth-generation shaman; their relationship spans two continents and eight years, leading her through a mystical late-life reinvention.

A dual-timeline mystery moving between a 1936 archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and the glamour of the 1978 Met Gala. Charlotte Cross, now a Metropolitan Museum curator, is pulled back toward the tragedy and buried secrets she fled decades earlier when a priceless Egyptian artifact vanishes — and a long-dormant curse seems to stir.

Why it’s here: One of its two leads, Charlotte, is a woman in her sixties reckoning with a long-buried past and quietly mentoring a much younger colleague — an older-woman protagonist at the heart of a glossy historical mystery.

Carol Shields’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows Daisy Goodwill Flett from her birth in 1905 to her death in the 1990s, tracing a life that is both ordinary and extraordinary. A quiet masterpiece about a woman who is nearly invisible to herself and others — until the reader sees her whole.

In 1621 the Yorkshire poet Edward Fairfax accused seven women from the village of Timble of witchcraft. They were tried twice at York and acquitted twice. Stephanie Shields retells the Trial of the Timble Witches from the women’s side, above all Margaret Hall’s — the strange woman of the title.

Four hundred years on, in the same valley, Margaret’s descendant Foster Hall is a curmudgeonly sheep farmer in want of a wife, and the witches have not finished interfering. A fusion of feminism, farming and the fantastical, written by a woman who farms sheep in the valley where it is set.

Why it’s here: Margaret Hall and the women of Timble were accused, imprisoned and tried by a powerful man who found them inconvenient — and they outlasted him by four hundred years. For any woman who has felt herself become inconvenient with age, this is a story about the kind of strength that gets handed down.

Kate Brown, a settled wife and mother, takes a summer job as a translator while her family scatters, and steps for the first time in decades outside the roles that have defined her. Through a love affair, a breakdown, and a slow unraveling of her careful self-image, she confronts how invisible a middle-aged woman can become — and what might be reclaimed. Doris Lessing’s unflinching novel is a landmark portrait of a woman at the threshold of later life.

Why it’s here: Kate is forty-five rather than fifty-plus, but the novel is squarely about aging, invisibility, and the reinvention waiting on the other side of midlife — the very passage CroneHub’s readers know well.

Sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot interviewed dozens of people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who were reinventing their lives — changing careers, discovering new passions, taking risks they’d deferred for decades. This book makes the case that the years between 50 and 75 are not a coda but a genuinely new chapter, full of possibility.

Joan Price is the foremost advocate for older people’s sexuality, and this is her definitive guide — covering everything from the physiological changes of menopause to navigating desire after illness, disability, or divorce. Frank, warm, and non-judgmental, it treats older women’s sexual lives with the seriousness they deserve.

Suze Orman’s complete guide to retirement planning for those in the critical pre-retirement decade. Covers Social Security, Medicare, 401(k) strategies, and how to make your money last as long as you do.

Emily Pollifax is a 60-year-old widow and garden club member who, bored with her safe life, applies to the CIA on impulse — and is accidentally sent on a real mission to Albania. Dorothy Gilman’s beloved series began in 1966 and ran for decades: a cheerful, enduring celebration of older women as adventurers, not bystanders.

Neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine reframes menopause as a neurological upgrade — arguing that the female brain actually improves in focus, decision-making, and emotional regulation after the transition. A profoundly optimistic perspective grounded in neuroscience.

Dr. Jen Gunter’s comprehensive, myth-busting guide to vaginal and vulvar health — including the massive changes menopause brings to genital tissue. Essential reading for any woman who wants accurate, evidence-based information about her body.

Award-winning writer Wendi Knox reframes aging as “becoming more of who you are, not less of what you were.” Sparked by a midlife reckoning and the symbolism of the dragonfly — which gains its wings late in life — the book offers nine “Dragonflying Lessons,” with exercises to help women escape cultural ageism and reclaim their voice and visibility.

Dr. Christiane Northrup treats menopause as a powerful life transition, not a medical problem. Drawing on medicine, psychology, and holistic healing, she guides women through the physical and emotional landscape of the change.