Books

Piercy at eighty-four, writing poems about cats, cooking, marriage, the dead, and her own approaching end with no softening whatsoever. The late work of a poet who has been documenting women lives since the 1960s.

The fifth volume in Cathleen Rountree’s acclaimed series on women’s life stages gathers candid interviews and luminous black-and-white portraits of sixteen women in their seventies — among them Doris Lessing, Betty Friedan, Madeleine L’Engle, and Liz Smith. Each reflects on creativity, loss, love, work, and the freedoms that arrive with age. A warm, frank chorus that reframes turning seventy as a passage into wisdom and possibility.

Interviews and portraits of women at fifty, on work, bodies, marriages and what they intend to do with the second half. The first in the series that continues with On Women Turning 70.

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.

Sheehy maps caregiving as a passage with predictable stages, drawn from her own seventeen years of it. Practical about the logistics and unusually direct about the resentment, exhaustion and identity loss that the role carries.

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.

When her charismatic, difficult mother Jane chooses to end her life at seventy-five, Susannah Kennedy inherits forty-five years of secret diaries. Over a year of reading them, she reckons with memory, grief, and the mother she thought she knew.

Jennifer L. Butz launched WonderCrone after colliding head-on with ageism at sixty, and Rebel Aging is her witty, clear-eyed reckoning with the myths women are handed about life after fifty. Part manifesto, part mirror, part marching orders, it reframes aging not as a descent but as a return — to voice, to vision, to self. Through personal stories, cultural critique, and a few well-placed shenanigans, Butz exposes how ageism shows up in our bodies, work, and relationships, and makes the case that wonder, wisdom, and purpose beat the lie of “anti-aging” every time. A rallying cry for reclaiming your edges, your joy, and your seat at any table.

Written in her sixty-seventh year, through a mastectomy, a savage review of her work, and the end of a love affair. Sarton set out to record what recovery actually looks like from the inside, and produced one of the few sustained accounts of an older woman body and mind under real strain.

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.

Miriam Goodman looks beyond financial planning to the everyday choices that shape a satisfying retirement. Based on interviews with retirees, its 389 ideas address work, play, home, relationships, health, money, and creating a purposeful next chapter.

When the company running her failing colony orders everyone offworld, seventy-year-old Ofelia quietly refuses to go — she has buried a lifetime here and will not spend her last years being managed. Alone and unexpectedly free, she finds she is not alone after all when the planet’s native people make contact and come to revere her as a “Nest Guardian.”

A rare science-fiction novel with an old woman at its heart: Hugo-nominated, and quietly radical about age, autonomy, and self-worth.

Growing older isn’t the problem. Outdated thinking about aging is.

ReSet is a practical guide for anyone in midlife and beyond who knows there must be more to this stage of life than slowing down and fading out. We are living longer, healthier, more capable lives than any generation before us, yet our beliefs about aging haven’t kept pace. From subtle workplace bias to the quiet voice telling us “I’m too old for that,” ageism shapes how we see ourselves and limits what we believe is possible.

ReSet challenges those assumptions and offers a new way forward — inviting readers to rethink aging, reconnect with their strengths, and design a life of purpose, curiosity, and contribution on their own terms.

Born at the end of the nineteenth century into a poor farming family in rural New South Wales, Dolly Maunder spends her life pushing at the doors society keeps locked to determined women. A husband and two children never quell her search for independence and a life she can call her own. Drawing on the story of her own grandmother, Kate Grenville traces one woman’s stubborn, costly climb — from girlhood to old age — through a world of limits. Shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

A memoir of coming of age at sixty. After three decades homesteading and teaching in Vermont, Deborah Lee Luskin is gripped by an unlikely urge to learn to hunt — and, wrestling her fears and ambivalence, finds a new place for herself in the natural world.

A surviving Morok and a wave of displaced gods throw Claire back into a war she thought she had won. Book 5 of The Crone Wars.

On the cusp of sixty, thrice-married Arden Rice must reckon with a lifetime of reckless choices when tragedy makes her guardian of her vulnerable granddaughter. A late-life redemption story.

Book 3 of Lynne Spreen’s Sedona Silver Romances. When her youngest leaves for college and her workaholic husband comes home smelling of someone else’s perfume, empty-nester Heather Winstead walks out and lands among friends in Sedona. Reliving her freedom, she and her husband each have to decide whether the marriage is worth a second chance.

When Joan Price lost her husband, she found there was no roadmap for rediscovering intimacy after such a loss — so she wrote one. Drawing on her own widowhood and the candid stories of other widows and widowers, this warm, practical guide treats sexuality as a healthy, life-affirming part of moving through grief, on your own timeline and in your own way.

Diana Athill wrote this memoir of old age at about 89: on sex and its fading, on letting go of what cannot be kept, and on the approach of death, without consolation or self-pity. Winner of the 2008 Costa Biography Award.

Broke and lonely, a widow returns to claim her childhood homestead near Sedona and is forced into an uneasy partnership with a land developer. An enemies-to-lovers, second-chance later-in-life romance and Book 1 of the Sedona Silver Romances.

Nelson is a Tufts researcher published in JAMA and the NEJM, and this is the evidence-based end of a shelf otherwise dominated by reversal claims. Directed specifically at women facing postmenopausal bone loss.

During the Great Depression, young dancers Mattie and Kip tap for coins and ride the rails until betrayal and disaster separate them for a lifetime. Now ninety-nine, Mattie finally tells her granddaughter the whole story.