Books

Former 1980s rock hopeful Libby Conlin has long since buried her music — until her newly divorced daughter posts the old recordings online and the industry comes calling. As her past resurfaces, mother and daughter remake their lives in a story about second acts and redefining love.

A spicy, satirical romp about a sixty-something woman who stumbles into a digital trap and comes out the other side owning her desire and her power. Billie Best skewers the culture’s assumptions about older women and sex, insisting with wit and nerve that a woman’s sensual life is far from over at 60.

Willa Drake is 61 when a phone call upends her settled life and sends her across the country to help a near-stranger. Anne Tyler’s novel is a gentle meditation on reinvention, on the ways we close ourselves off, and on what it takes to start over in the second half of life.

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.

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.

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.

This is an anthology of works performed at the (now sadly defunct) Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland, California, at readings of erotica by women over fifty. The Dirty Old Women reading series pushes San Francisco Bay Area culture in the direction of celebrating sexuality after menopause. This volume is a varied collection from the readings, with stories, book excerpts, and poetry.

Full disclosure: My short story, “Terraforming,” is included in this collection. Many of the other stories were written by friends, so naturally I am fond of this volume for personal reasons as well as the fun read it undoubtedly is. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, or if you travel there, check out the Dirty Old Women reading schedule (usually the 4th Tuesday of the month).

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.

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.

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.

The Menopausal Superheroes step out of the shadows, and the pressure mounts on every front. As public scrutiny intensifies and their personal lives strain under the weight of secret identities, the women must navigate fresh dangers while holding together a fragile alliance and the relationships that matter most.

n this poignant tale, Jong interweaves the narrator’s sexual experience in her sixties with tales of her formerly glamorous parents as their health fails. As my own mother told me when she was in her nineties and I was in my sixties, “Enjoy your youth.”

Jong’s protagonist is determined to do just that. She works hard to reclaim the joys of her long-term marriage, and dances to the siren music of potential affairs. Ripe women have been dancing that tightrope for centuries without the benefit of literary models; Jong’s art makes visible what has been invisible. For those of us determined to prioritize our own erotic and creative lives, even while doing our best for aging parents and young adult children, this book holds up a mirror to the lives we are leading.

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.

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.

Regina, 89, and Jackie, 90, together for six decades, get through one winter day in 2017, with memories reaching back to a 1955 bar raid. A novel about long love, old age and a lesbian couple’s shared history.

A short-story collection in the Menopausal Superheroes series, gathering four original tales that fill the gaps between the novels. The stories trace the fraught relationship between Patricia, the Lizard Woman, and her former friend turned mad scientist Dr. Cindy Liu, exploring what it means to be a hero in midlife and beyond.

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.

A fictionalized life of Japanese poet Yosano Akiko, who defied her era’s constraints to become a pioneering feminist and the first to render The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese. Through poverty, betrayal, earthquake, and fire, her fierce devotion to art wounds her daughter — and she sets out to make amends before it’s too late.

Why it’s here: It follows Akiko across a whole life into older age — an unflinching portrait of a woman artist aging and trying to repair what her ambition cost.

Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize–winning novel follows twelve characters — mostly Black British women, spanning generations from a teenager to a woman in her nineties — whose lives interweave across a century and the length of Britain, from Newcastle to Cornwall. Each is chasing something: a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to belong, a lost mother or father, a touch of hope. Told in Evaristo’s fluid, near-verse style, it is a portrait of British womanhood as it has rarely been written.

When four ordinary women hit menopause, the change turns out to be far stranger than hot flashes. After using the same small company’s natural products, Helen can shoot fire, Patricia becomes bulletproof, Jessica floats, and Linda gains immense strength and a new male body. United by that one common link, the unlikely heroines set out to find the woman responsible.

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.

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.