Aging Fiction

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.

This award-winning anthology of poetry and prose takes a new look at being a woman - particularly an aging woman - in a society that prizes and glorifies youth. The works are by both younger writers looking forward in time and writers who have experienced the joys and challenges of growing older. This international best seller was put together by editor Sandra Martz who selected the collection's pieces from thousands of submitted manuscripts.

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.

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.

This stunning new novel showcases Sue Miller's singular gift for exposing the nerves that lie hidden in marriages and families, and the hopes and regrets that lie buried in the hearts of women.

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.

Master acupuncturist Dianne Connelly has written a paean to healthy living. But the book is less about health than about wisdom. With her own definitions and explications of essential words to live by, with poetry such as filled her previous book, All Sickness Is Homesickness, and with personal stories from her own life and the lives of those she has treated, Dianne points the way to a life of spirit and courage.

Self-help books offer solid, beneficial techniques, but they really only work for the young. Award-winning comedy writer Gene Perret reveals that more mature devotees must adjust these techniques, tweak them, alter them, and in some cases, ignore them completely. New Tricks for Old Dogs points out some of the flaws in the self-help philosophy. It tempers the advice with common sense. The battle cry of this volume is do it, but don't overdo it.

The intrepid women of The Hot Flash Club are back for the holidays, soothing jingled nerves and stressed shoppers in their exclusive spa and celebrating the joys of the season. In her witty and delightfully wisecracking prose, Nancy Thayer tells a heartwarming tale packed with fun, secrets, romance, and an ample dose of good cheer.

In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two sisters, Leokadia and Helena, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them were imprisoned as children in Auschwitz during World War II.

Great advice on exercise and nutrition for a healthy lifestyle. Are you living a fairy tale? If you are really serious about getting the best body, the best nutrition and the best antiaging methods, once pudgy young woman, now bodysculpting champion Donna Aston will show you: why 95 percent of people who lose weight regain it and then some, how low-fat dieting is the greatest scam going, and why those empty processed carbohydrates go straight to the fat bins on your hips.

From the best-selling authors of The Hell with Love, a fierce, funny, touching collection that takes the sting out of "aging while female".

Kiss Tomorrow Hello brings together the experiences and reflections of women as they embark on a new stage of life. The 25 stellar writers gathered here explore a wide range of concerns, including keeping love and sex alive, discovering family secrets, negotiating the demands of illness and infertility, letting children go, making peace with parents, and contemplating plastic surgery. The tales are true, the confessions candid, and the humor infectious.

From #1 New York Times best-selling humorist Jill Conner Browne comes a hilarious life maintenance program designed to help women navigate our hyper-visual society's obsessions with body image, clothing, and personal appearance. Getting and keeping that Queenly Look is no small feat - a good portion of our lives is devoted to our hair, our skin tone, our figure flaws, and our clothes.

When a K-pop boy band shows up to “save Christmas,” it’s the last straw! Santa Claus may be getting older, achier, more forgetful over the years, but he is determined to prove to the world he can still do his job without anyone’s help.

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.

Sincerity is Duffy’s final collection of poems as Poet Laureate and the much-anticipated successor to the Costa Award-winning The Bees. Time and its passage are at the heart of this reflective work, which gazes out from the autumn of life. There are moving elegies here for what has departed; whether that be children who have flown the nest, a way of life, literary luminaries, past loves, lost parents or our own youth.