Aging Fiction

Told through the eyes of a very grumpy yet lovable mutt, a funny and touching tale of aging, death, friendship, and life that proves sometimes a dog's story is the most human of all. Tassen has always been a one-man dog. When his human companion, Major Thorkildsen, dies, Tassen and Mrs...

Miss Julia, a recently bereaved and newly wealthy widow, is only slightly bemused when one Hazel Marie Puckett appears at her door with a youngster in tow and unceremoniously announces that the child is the bastard son of Miss Julia's late husband. Suddenly, this longtime church member and...

A funny and moving novel about love, loss, and new beginnings found on an unlikely road trip Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates...

Brimming with charm and whimsy, this exquisite novel set in the Tower of London has the transportive qualities and delightful magic of the contemporary classics Chocolat and Amélie. Balthazar Jones has lived in the Tower of London with his loving wife, Hebe, and his 120-year-old pet tortoise...

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately...

A retired accountant becomes the town’s fortune-teller in this witty and charming debut Norbert Zelenka has always lived life on the sidelines. It’s why at seventy-three years old he’s broke and alone except for the company of a Chihuahua. But when “Carlotta’s Club”—three...

When her father dies, Kay Wilkinson can’t cry. Over ten years, Alzheimer’s had steadily eroded this erudite man into a paranoid lunatic. Surely one’s own father passing should never come as such a relief. Both medical professionals, Kay and her husband Cyril have seen too many elderly...

Joan Boice, a retired school teacher afflicted with dementia, hoped to hang on to her dignity and safety when she checked into Emerald Hills, a facility run by America’s largest assisted living company. What she and her family got was an introduction to what many think is the country’s next great health crisis.

The writer whom Fran Lebowitz compared to the author of The Great Gatsby, calling him “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald,” makes his Penguin Classics debut with this beautiful deluxe edition of his best-loved book. One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is...

From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a suspenseful and poignant story of a family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father—an engineer who they discover is involved in an ominous secret military project Until recently, Zvi Luria was...

Beloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal, at ninety-five years old, is a national treasure. Working at the height of her powers, in this story collection she turns her gimlet eye and compassionate humor on aging and life in the slow lane. From the master of the short short comes a collection of sixteen new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over forty years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging.

December comes to quaint Hearts Bend, Tennessee, with a blanket of white and the glitter of Christmas lights. For JoJo Castle there is no place like home. Her onetime love of adventure ended when her life in the big city came crashing down. Now that she’s home, she never wants to leave again...

From the bestselling author of Eventide, The Tie That Binds is a powerfully eloquent tribute to the arduous demands of rural America, and of the tenacity of the human spirit. Colorado, January 1977. Eighty-year-old Edith Goodnough lies in a hospital bed, IV taped to the back of her hand...

“Miller depicts [her characters] with grace and elegance, enriching their perceptions with strands of connecting images and intertwined history.... A very moving book.”—New York Times Book Review From bestselling author Sue Miller comes the poignant story of a mother and son that touches...

The women who spent their childhood summers in a small southern town discover it harbors secrets as lush as the marshes that surround it... Bonny Blankenship’s most treasured memories are of idyllic summers spent in Watersend, South Carolina, with her best friend, Lainey McKay. Amid the sand...

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...

Heralding the arrival of a stunning new voice in American fiction, Robin Black’s If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This takes readers into the minds and hearts of people navigating the unsettling transitions that life presents to us all. Written with maturity and insight, and in beautiful...

The New York Times bestselling and legendary author of Helen of Troy and Elizabeth I now turns her gaze on Emperor Nero, one of the most notorious and misunderstood figures in history. Built on the backs of those who fell before it, Julius Caesar’s imperial dynasty is only as strong as the...

As three generations of women navigate the uncertain paths of their hearts and futures, one summer promises to bring change—whether they’re ready for it or not. At thirty-eight, garden shop owner Jessie McBride thinks her chances for romance are years behind her and, after her failed...

In this celebrated novel, Margaret Laurence writes with grace, power, and deep compassion about Rachel Cameron, a woman struggling to come to terms with love, with death, with herself and her world. Trapped in a milieu of deceit and pettiness – her own and that of others – Rachel longs for...