Aging Fiction

Joy Bergman is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would prefer. She won't take their advice, and she won't take an antidepressant. Her marriage to their father, Aaron, has lasted through health and dementia, as well as some phenomenally lousy business...

“A story of love and youth and pain that will have you clutching at your heart. I want everyone to read it; I want to press it into people’s hands. Surely one of the best novels I’ve ever read.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost Soon to be a...

We are each crowned twice in this lifetime, teaches the Jungian analyist Marion Woodward. Much is written about the promise of the first crowning, at birth. But what of the second, which comes only after a lifetime of experience? This "crown of age" she says, a symbol for the culmination of our inner and outer development as human beings.

To this irresistible debut collection of short stories, Richard Russo brings the same bittersweet wit, deep knowledge of human nature, and spellbinding narrative gifts that distinguish his best-selling novels. His themes are the imperfect bargains of marriage; the discoveries and...

“Captures the richness and complication of female friendships in a way few writers have done. . . incredibly rich characterizations and a profound sense of place.” — Cosmopolitan In her magnificent classic Outer Banks, acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Anne Rivers Siddons...

For fans of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Great Disasters is a stirring debut novel about six young men coming of age, and the enduring friendships that make us who we are—even as our paths diverge. This is the story of how we became. I write those words...

“Anne Rivers Siddons’s novels are women’s stories in the best sense, pulling you into the internal landscape of her characters’ lives and holding you there.” – People A poignant novel of the love that unites us and the secrets that drive us apart, Islands is New York Times...

From Kim Edwards, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper's Daughter, an arresting novel of one family's secret history Imbued with all the lyricism, compassion, and suspense of her bestselling novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards’s The Lake of Dreams is a...

Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, has come to the end of a very long and unusual journey, and for the second time in his life he has the time to think about all the things that have and have not come to pass. The truth is, a lot of remarkable things have happened in...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER With brilliant and audacious strokes, E. L. Doctorow creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on an idea of the modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring tour de force is a detective...

A delightful, witty, passionate novel that follows its hero from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century—from a master of American letters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows Owen...

Drawing on the author’s seven years of caring for his mother through Alzheimer's, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver is what its title promises: four dispatches to an anonymous long-term caregiver. In brief passages that cast fresh light on what it means to live with dementia, Barnes shares trials, insights, solace - and, ultimately, inspiration.

A deliciously compulsive first novel from New York Times Editor's Choice author of Lights On, Rats Out, Cree LeFavour's Private Means captures the very essence of summer in a sharply observed, moving meditation on marriage, money, and loss. It's Memorial Day weekend and Alice's beloved dog...

A wild, inventive ride of a short story collection from a distinctive new American storyteller. The stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon...

Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple in the second entry of this cozy sci-fi mystery series, helmed by a formidable no-nonsense auntie of a detective. Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty's most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously...

Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman’s children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of...

A smart and deliciously funny novel by the bestselling author of The Friday Night Knitting Club—and “readers will be cheering” (Bookreporter.com)... Shortly before turning the big five-oh, Cooking with Gusto! TV personality Augusta “Gus” Simpson finds herself planning a birthday party...

A brief, lyrical novel with a powerful emotional charge, Rules for Old Men Waiting is about three wars of the twentieth century and an ever-deepening marriage. In a house on the Cape “older than the Republic,” Robert MacIver, a historian who long ago played rugby for Scotland, creates a list...

A STUNNING DEBUT NOVEL FROM JENNA BUSH HAGER’S NEW VENTURE, THOUSAND VOICES A woman finds herself torn between her first love and her devoted husband in this extraordinary debut novel that asks the question: Can one heart hold two great loves? “A magnificent, spellbinding love story...

“Honey isn’t one of these frail wraiths who sip tea and shuffle in worn slippers. Honey subsists on Viognier and Valium and slips on Louboutins just to run to the grocery store.…a feisty heroine readers will embrace as an octogenarian with attitude to spare.” — Booklist Meet a woman as...