Aging Fiction

A caregiving guidebook to help you navigate your caregiving journey with skill and confidence, Navigating the Caregiver River: A Journey to Sustainable Caregiving empowers the family caregiver with tools and strategies to create a sustainable caregiving experience for the duration of the journey.

At some point in everyone's life, everyone will be placed in the position of dealing with the death of a loved one. Arranging all the necessary details at such a difficult time can prove overwhelming. However, help is now at hand in this guide that covers all the essential aspects. Drawing from the counsel of funeral directors, clergy, attorneys, estate planners, and psychologists and with references to Web sites and other sources of further information, this book provides straightforward and reassuring advice that is both practical and comforting at this difficult time.

Growing up in foster care, Muir has lived in many houses. And if she's learned one thing, it is to Pack. Light. Carry only what fits in a suitcase. Toothbrush? Yes. Socks? Yes. Emotional attachment to friends? Foster families? A boyfriend? Nope! There's no room for any additional baggage. Muir has just one year left before she ages out of the system. One year before she's free. One year to avoid anything - or anyone - that could get in her way. Then she meets Francine. And Kira. And Sean. And everything changes.

Jadunath Kunwar’s beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. In 1935 in a village near George Orwell’s birthplace, Jadu’s mother, while pregnant with him, nearly dies from a cobra bite. When we see Jadu again, he is in college, meeting the Sherpa who first summited Everest and wondering what it means to be modern. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, and as changes big and small sweep across India, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places.

An aging New Yorker, a writer named Nick, feels life ebbing out of him. One night, at a dimly lit bar, he meets a tantalizing young woman, and the night that follows is the most extraordinary of his life. Propelled by uncontrollable, primordial desires, he tastes human blood for the first time and is filled with a sexual and spiritual ecstasy. His revival quickly fades, and soon Nick is yearning for another taste of the elusive rapture.

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon.

Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past.

All of us are familiar with the fairy tales of youth where the young hero and heroine fall in love, defeat their enemies, marry, and live happily ever after. The fairy tales gathered here are about what happens next, when the Prince goes bald and the Princess has a midlife crisis. They portray middle-aged men and women facing the special issues dealing with crisis, aging and mortality, and the desire for renewal.

Rose is delightful, flamboyant, and a widow. Having just lost her husband, Rose's daughter steps in to find Rose increasingly disoriented and forgetful. Even as a nurse, Maureen does not recognize the early signs of her mother's dementia - a diagnosis that changes her mother's life and those close to her. The contrast between the reality of Rose's condition and the "Casablanca Style" in which she lived is stark yet beautiful. This book parallels Still Alice's medical description of the illness but picks up where Still Alice leaves off.

Meet Claire: fifty-two, desperate to do something new and get a fresh start. Enter the chance to go to Rome: Home to a struggling convent facing a precipitous end, the city beckons Claire, who's long had a complicated relationship with religion, including a “missed connection” with convent life in her teens. Once in Rome, she finds a group of funny, fearless nuns in a gorgeous villa, beautiful runs throughout a color-saturated city, and a chance to reflect. It all leads her to an unexpected question—should she join the convent?

When 39-year-old Maria Forssmann wakes up in her 17-year-old body, she doesn’t know how she got there. All she does know is she has to get back: to her home in Bienville, Mississippi, to her job as a successful psychiatrist and, most importantly, to her husband, daughters, and unborn son.

From birth to death, a lyrical exploration of the role of transformation in human life. To be alive is to be in perpetual metamorphosis: Growing, healing, learning, aging. In Shapeshifters, physician and writer Gavin Francis considers the inevitable changes all of our bodies undergo - such as birth, puberty, and death, but also laughter, sleeping, and healing - and those that only some of our bodies will: Like getting a tattoo, experiencing psychosis, suffering anorexia, being pregnant, or undergoing a gender transition.

New York Times best-selling author Ted C. Fishman reveals the stunning challenges of a world awash with seasoned citizens. By 2030, those over 50 will outnumber people under 17 for the first time in history. Fishman explores the resulting impact on families, businesses, nations, and medical care.

It's a proven fact that people who eat a raw vegan diet live longer, never age, and make approximately a million dollars or more each year (eat more greens, make more green). Now you, too, can learn the secrets of the perfect human diet in The Raw Vegan Bible by esteemed author (and super cool musician), Dr. David "Greens" Connor. Learn why enzymes are the key to increasing vitality and raising your Kundalini energy.

To all appearances, Zachary King is a man with luck on his side. A steady, well-paying job, a rent-free Manhattan apartment, and Hope, his stunning, blue-blooded fiancee: smart, sexy, and completely out of his league. But as the wedding day looms, Zack finds himself haunted by the memory of his best friend, Rael, killed in a car wreck two years earlier, and by his increasingly complicated feelings for Tamara, the beautiful widow Rael left behind.

In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, 70-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: Reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. No longer can he remain aloof from his community.

When your moods and energy levels unpredictably swing from one extreme to another, it can be a challenge to merely go through life each day. While bipolar disorder is treatable today, there is no cure for it. In these circumstances, it's important that you have a thorough plan to guide you through life. When you live with bipolar disorder, your unpredictable ability to sleep, your mood swings and the side effects of your medications can make life difficult to manage.

The information in To Die Well is both comforting and empowering. Knowing our rights to refuse treatment, as well as legal ways to bring about death if pain or distress cannot be alleviated, will spare us the frightening helplessness that can rob our last days of meaning and connection with others.

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.

As an adult, National Public Radio foreign correspondent Jacki Lyden has spent her life on the front lines of some of the world's most dangerous war zones. As a child, she lived in a war zone of a different kind. Her mother, Dolores, suffered from what is now called manic depression. In her manic phases, Dolores became Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba, exotically delusional, yet to young Jacki also transcendent, even inspiring. In time, Jacki grew to accept, even relish, Dolores' bizarre episodes, marveling at her mother's creative energy and using it to fuel her own.