Books

Emily Pollifax is a 60-year-old widow and garden club member who, bored with her safe life, applies to the CIA on impulse — and is accidentally sent on a real mission to Albania. Dorothy Gilman’s beloved series began in 1966 and ran for decades: a cheerful, enduring celebration of older women as adventurers, not bystanders.

Award-winning writer Wendi Knox reframes aging as “becoming more of who you are, not less of what you were.” Sparked by a midlife reckoning and the symbolism of the dragonfly — which gains its wings late in life — the book offers nine “Dragonflying Lessons,” with exercises to help women escape cultural ageism and reclaim their voice and visibility.

Journalist Melinda Blau draws lessons from nine women in their nineties and hundreds whose lives challenge stereotypes about old age. Their friendships reveal the sustaining power of curiosity, purpose, gratitude, humor, resilience, and connection across generations.

In this is who I am: our beauty in all shapes and sizes pictures of women up to age 95, unclothed, with a statement by each woman, form the basis of this photographic essay book.  It is a beautiful book that reminds us to love and cherish the great gifts that are our bodies:  So much of what these women wrote concerns their worries about the appearance of their bodies. 

The contrast between their beauty and their worries is poignant.

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.

From chartered psychologist Dr. Denise Taylor, ThriveSpan is a reflective, research-grounded guide to later life — charting a more conscious path through aging where wellbeing, purpose, and reflection meet. Drawing on psychology, lived experience, and the restorative influence of nature, it reframes growing older as a season to walk gently into what matters now.

Lottie Jones is seventy-five, retired, and — as far as her bingo friends know — perfectly ordinary. What they don’t know is that Lottie is a retired serial killer who long ago changed her name and vanished into small-town life. When a dogged young journalist turns up asking about a string of unsolved cases, Lottie’s quiet retirement is suddenly, dangerously over. A sharp, blackly funny thriller.

Sa’ and Ch’idzigyaak are two old women, abandoned by their Athabascan tribe during a desperate winter. Rather than die as expected, they decide to survive — and in doing so, teach their community something essential about the value of its elders. Velma Wallis’s retelling of a traditional Alaskan legend is brief, powerful, and quietly radical.

A registered dietitian’s warm, anti-diet guide to being at home in a changing body. Deb Benfield untangles the “anti-aging” and wellness messaging that puts older women at war with themselves, offering a way to nourish and trust your body — through food, movement, and mindfulness — rather than police it.

In a letter to someone she loves above all others, Violeta recounts a life spanning a hundred years and two pandemics — from her birth in the 1920s, as the Spanish flu reaches her South American homeland, to old age. Through the Great Depression, the rise and fall of tyrants, and the fight for women’s rights, she lives devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Isabel Allende delivers an epic, deeply emotional portrait of a woman whose passion, determination, and humor carry her through a century of upheaval.

Thayer was sixty-three, and her husband seventy-four, when they walked sixteen hundred miles across the Gobi in summer. She is matter-of-fact about the physical arithmetic of doing this at that age, which is exactly what makes it useful.

When her husband of forty-three years leaves alone for a dig in Peru, sixty-four-year-old Eisel Jane McCord finally chases her own teenage bucket list — a house of her own and a great romance — with two suitors complicating the plan. Book 2 of the Lovesong Encore later-in-life romance series.

Book one of the Women of the Canyon series. In a near-future desert community, five women aged 58 to 74 find each other at the moment life asks each of them to begin again — with Raven, a horse trainer and psychologist who can read fear in a skittish mare and a guarded heart, at the center. When old power tries to script the canyon’s future, the five choose to write their own. Pangman published this, her debut novel, at 73, and is blunt about the intent: older women are too often written as supporting characters in someone else’s story, and these five are not.

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.

This visually stunning book includes photographs and quotes from women in from their sixties all the way to a hundred years of age.  Some of these women are well-known and others are obscure.  All show the beauty of women as we grow in age and wisdom.  Try this book as a stimulus to your own creativity as a writer and artist.

Marienau and Zelitzky have spent years interviewing women between seventy and one hundred and ten for their podcast, and this is the book that came out of it: artists, activists and entrepreneurs who are visibly not finished. Built against the assumption that the later decades are a subtraction.

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.