Books
Recommended reads for women navigating midlife and beyond.
The Newcomers: The Chronicles of Touperdu, Book I
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.
This Much is True
Veronica Harmon is celebrating her fifty-eighth birthday when she meets her daughter future father-in-law and recognizes him from a night in high school she has never told anyone about. A novel about what a survivor owes herself forty years on. Content note: sexual assault.
Three Days in June
Over the three days around her daughter Debbie’s wedding, Gail Baines — recently passed over at work and never at ease with people — finds her carefully ordered life upended when her ex-husband arrives with a foster cat and a family secret surfaces. Anne Tyler’s slim late novel is a masterwork of compression: a woman in her sixties quietly reckoning with the marriage she left and the life still ahead of her.
True Confessions of an Ambivalent Caregiver
A candid, funny-but-brutal memoir-in-essays about the four years spent caring for a dying eighty-six-year-old father — refusing to romanticize caregiving or its toll on a family.
We Did This Once Before
Divorced and middle-aged, Kim returns to Florida to help her aging mother and is pulled into a cascade of family crises, including relatives coping with dementia. A standalone later-in-life women’s fiction novel.