Books

Recently widowed and facing the return of advanced breast cancer, Kat Jamison retreats to a Blue Ridge Mountains cabin to decide whether to keep fighting. When a wildfire traps her with two stranded children and their dogs, she must lead them on foot through a burning forest — and discover how fiercely she still wants to live. A taut survival novel anchored by an older woman’s reckoning with mortality.

Mary Pipher, the psychologist who wrote Reviving Ophelia, turns her attention to older women in this luminous portrait of aging as a time of hard-won joy. Drawing on interviews and her own experience, she explores how women in their 60s, 70s, and beyond find meaning, resilience, and unexpected pleasure — even in the face of loss.