Books

A forty-nine-year-old archaeology professor travels to Poland after her estranged father’s death and uncovers her family’s wartime history — finding, along the way, a first romance and a new calling restoring Jewish cemeteries.

Why it’s here: Klara is 49 as it opens — a hair under our usual line — but the arc is pure second-half reinvention and reclaimed history.

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.

Our spiritual foremothers are the proper ladies of this California writing circle of the 1980s. The formal tone of these stories contrast beautifully with the tales of one-night stands, lovers who find each other after decades apart, and the bliss of married love as well. Just as in the Elderotica writing group that is still going strong in the Bay Area, the Ladies in this book use writing prompts to get their juices flowing, and they share some of their prompts here. As in my new book from North Atlantic Press, the Ladies’ Own Erotica encourages women of a certain age to come together in writing circles and share erotica and conversation.

Each of the women has a chance to tell her own story, and why she enjoyed the writing circle, in the “Kensington Ladies Revealed” chapter at the end of the book. There is something wonderful about coming together to write erotica, as these ladies discovered long ago.

Morayo Da Silva, a Nigerian-born retired English professor, lives vibrantly alone in San Francisco surrounded by her beloved books, driving a sports car she calls Buttercup at seventy-four. When a fall lands her in a rehabilitation facility, her hard-won independence is shaken and she begins to reckon with her past loves and the life she has made. Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s slim, luminous novel is a tender, sensuous portrait of an older woman fully alive to the world.

On New Year’s Eve 1984, 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish—once the highest-paid advertising woman in America as R.H. Macy’s star copywriter—sets out on a ten-mile walk across Manhattan, revisiting the places and choices of a remarkable life. Inspired by the real-life poet and ad woman Margaret Fishback, Kathleen Rooney’s novel is a witty, defiant portrait of a woman who refuses to shrink with age.

A collection of short stories about the drama, humor, and reinvention of midlife and the years beyond. Spreen’s debut short-fiction collection earned a five-star review from Readers’ Favorite.

A second collection of uplifting short stories about the second half of life — a couple attempting role-reversal in retirement, friends confronting a loss of purpose, and seniors taking new chances on love. The sequel to Middle-Aged Crazy.

On her deathbed, historian Claudia Hampton looks back across a long, adventurous life — a wartime love affair in the Egyptian desert, decades of independent thought, and the knowledge that history is always personal. Penelope Lively’s Booker Prize-winning novel is one of the great portrayals of a brilliant woman aging on her own terms.

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.

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.

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.

Wealthy, newly widowed Claire is adrift; Erica, a burnt-out young outreach worker, is about to be fired. Their collision becomes a partnership to get ten unhoused women off the streets and into a community of their own — until one woman’s past threatens it all.

Why it’s here: Newly widowed Claire finds late-life purpose and reinvention through the women she sets out to help.

I have been a fan of Sharon Olds‘ poetry ever since she spoke out about incest in her collection, The Dead and the Living (1983). Her work is incredibly incisive, beautifully crafted, and utterly unblinking, even as she examines subjects we are discouraged from mentioning, much less capturing in poetry.

The personal nature of Olds‘ poetry, her focus on her children, her marriage, and her own sexuality, has made her controversial throughout her career. Yet she has persevered, and later in her career won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer for Stag’s Leap, her 2012 volume about the end of her long marriage.

In her 2016 book “Odes,” the poet explores sexuality from her vantage point as a woman in her sixties. Poems like “Blow Job Ode,” and “Ode to the Clitoris,” continue her saga of making the personal poetic.

These poems make it clear that being a certain age is no reason to stop examining (and enjoying) sexuality.

Lucy Barton and her first husband William, now in their sixties and long divorced, take an unexpected trip together to find the half-sister William never knew he had — a secret daughter of his late mother, living in Maine. Elizabeth Strout’s luminous novel is about the persistence of love in its strangest forms, and about what we keep discovering about ourselves and each other as we age.

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.

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.

When a parent’s attack sends traumatized teacher Chelsea Garden fleeing home to the California foothills, her life tangles with a beleaguered principal and an old flame. Following three educators at different stages, it’s a novel about the calling of teaching and the courage to change course.

Why it’s here: One of its three educators is a veteran principal in the last chapter of her career, weighing reinvention in her later working years — an older woman’s story threaded through an ensemble.

In Edinburgh’s COVID-lockdown spring of 2020, cold-case detective DCI Karen Pirie learns of an unfinished manuscript by a recently dead crime novelist — one whose plot reads like a blueprint for the real, unsolved disappearance of a university student. As Karen digs, she uncovers a spiralling game of betrayal and revenge where lies are indistinguishable from truth. The Queen of Crime delivers one of her most fiendishly clever Karen Pirie cases yet.

Why it’s here: A genre thriller rather than a book about aging, but its lead is a seasoned, midlife woman investigator — competence and command held by an older woman at the center of the story.

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.

Avey Johnson, recently widowed and newly wealthy, is on a luxury Caribbean cruise when she feels compelled to abandon ship and take an unexpected journey to the small island of Carriacou. Paule Marshall’s lyrical novel is about a Black woman in her 60s reclaiming her cultural roots and herself.

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.

Two standalone science-fiction crime novellas bound together. In Mary Robinette Kowal’s Apprehension, a grieving grandmother named Bonnyjean — decades ago a special-forces operative, now slowed by a bad hip — takes her family to the planet where she once served. When her young grandson is kidnapped by people convinced she carries a dead agent’s secret, she refuses to let age or injury stop her from getting him back. The pairing, Sam J. Miller’s Red Star Hustle, is a caper of its own; only Kowal’s half centers an older woman, but her late-life grit earns the shelf space.