Aging Fiction

Lewis Madigan is young, gay, out of work, and getting antsy when he’s roped into providing end-of-life care for his insufferable homophobic neighbor, Chester Wheeler. Lewis doesn’t need the aggravation, just the money. The only requirements: run errands, be on call, and put up with a miserable old churl no one else in Buffalo can bear. After exchanging barbs, bickering, baiting, and pushing buttons, Chester hits Lewis with the big ask. Lewis can’t say no to a dying wish.

Worried that old age will inevitably mean losing your libido, your health, and possibly your marbles too? Well, Cicero has some good news for you. In How to Grow Old, the great Roman orator and statesman eloquently describes how you can make the second half of life the best part of all - and why you might discover that reading and gardening are actually far more pleasurable than sex ever was.

Muriel Spark's blackly comic masterwork begins with a voice on the telephone warning, "Remember, you must die." The recipient of the grim message is elderly Dame Lettie Colston, but soon 10 of Lettie's oldest friends also become targets of Death's anonymous herald. A bizarre investigation lays bare an intricate network of deception and disloyalty that binds together the vulnerable group of aging eccentrics.

The life of 79-year-old pensioner Peggy Smart is as beige as the décor in her retirement village. Her week revolves around aqua aerobics and appointments with her doctor. Following a very minor traffic accident, things have turned frosty with her grown-up children, and she is afraid they are trying to take away her independence. Noticing her memory isn't what it used to be, Peggy is taking ever more inventive steps to cover up her dwindling faculties.

Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout’s new novel tells the story of a chance incident that sparks a powerful realization in a beloved teacher’s life—a poignant meditation on loneliness, friendship, parenthood, and the importance of truth in a...

“Middle Spoon subverts the ordinary novel with intelligence and vulnerability. . . . Varela has made a sly, analytical opera of the heart.” —Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less and Less Is Lost “A rollicking delight! . . . Varela asks provocative questions about the shape of family and...

Winner of Northern Lit Award Finalist for the Leacock Medal for Humour Quill & Quire "Books of the Year 2016" Globe & Mail "Best Canadian Fiction of 2016" A Penguin Book Club Pick A woman goes over a waterfall, a video goes viral, a family goes into meltdown—life is about to get a lot more...

From Peter Mayle, a wonderful new novel steeped in wine—and the business of wine?and set in, bien sûr, Provence. Max Skinner is not exactly setting the London financial world on fire?and when his supervisor steals his biggest client, it’s definitely time to inspect the vineyard in Provence...

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in Northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm...

Something bad is happening.... One touch and a person begins aging rapidly. Years in a single day. Before anyone can react or stop it, entire cities are crippled. As survivors flee to their homes, Elizabeth and her children watch with an increasing sense of dread as the death toll climbs. Then, when a terrifying way to slow the aging is witnessed online, the enormity of the event becomes clear.

A poignant, uplifting, brilliantly insightful story of one woman's end-of-life reckoning with her past, her lost daughter and herself, for readers of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Still Alice and Elizabeth Is Missing. When her husband left her with a baby, a toddler and a fledgling...

This funny and endearing novel of family, secrets, and aging follows an elderly man who heads off on a joyride with a new young friend—who may have some secrets of her own. A driving force in literature, the one and only Lee Smith returns with a road trip novel, a story full of hope and humor...

When Mackenzie, Sunna, and Maude move into a converted rental house, they are strangers with only one thing in common - important people in their lives have “ghosted” them. Mackenzie’s sister, Sunna’s best friend, and Maude’s fiancé - all gone with no explanation. So when a mangled, near-indecipherable letter arrives in their shared mailbox - hinting at long-awaited answers - each tenant assumes it’s for her.

At nearly 90, retired nature writer Hattie Bloom prefers the company of birds to people, but when a fall lands her in a nursing home, she struggles to cope with the loss of independence and privacy. From the confines of her 'room with a view' of the carpark, she dreams of escape. A fellow 'inmate', the gregarious would-be comedian Walter Clements, also plans on returning home as soon as he is fit and able to take charge of his mobility scooter.

From New York Times bestselling author Max Lucado comes a timeless message that will warm your heart. “The Christmas Candle shines with a radiant insight. Written with Max Lucado’s signature style of sincerity and spiritual perception, this story will warm the reader’s heart with the...

Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows readers an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the Moving Picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister...

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...

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...

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., spiritually suited to playing left field but forced by a bad hamstring to try first base, is the unlikely chairman of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a duck, has his...

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...