Aging Fiction

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 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.

Aprende a centrar más la mirada en ti y a añadirle pimienta a tus relaciones. Únete a ese grupo de mujeres,encantadoramente seductoras, que no se quedan mirando el pasado sino que toman sus propias decisiones porqueestán seguras de que lo mejor está aún por llegar. Solteras, casadas, divorciadas y vueltas a casar, las cuarentonas del siglo XXI, a diferencia de sus antecesoras, son seguras, dueñas de sus destinos, fuertes, decididas y emprendedoras. Se han redescubierto y han dejado atrás la menopausia emocional.

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.

A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?

Now in his sixties, big-wave surfer Joe Sharkey has passed his prime and is losing his “stoke.” The younger surfers around the breaks on the north shore of Oahu still idolize the Shark, but his sponsors are looking elsewhere. One night, while driving home from a bar after one too many, Joe accidentally kills a stranger near Waimea, a tragedy that sends his life out of control. As the repercussions of the accident spiral ever wider, Joe's devoted girlfriend, Olive, throws herself into uncovering the dead man’s identity and helping Joe find vitality and refuge in the waves again.

The notorious baby boomers - the largest age cohort in history - are approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. Now they are asking: What was that all about? Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you're gone the reputation you leave behind?

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.

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.

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.

The stunning novella that concludes John Updike's acclaimed Rabbit series is now available on audio. Set 10 years after Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's death, Rabbit Remembered returns listeners to the small Pennsylvania town where Harry's widow, Janice, and his son, Nelson, still reside. They are faced with a surprise when Annabelle, Harry's 39-year-old illegitimate daughter, arrives on the scene, bringing with her ghosts from the past.

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.

She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When their parents died in a plane crash, Nick and his identical twin, Nate, end up bouncing around foster care, always trying to find a way back together. No one wants two teenage boys, until the night Mama Jean made them a deal they couldn't refuse. Now he has finished college, and is the new baseball coach and teacher at his old high school. Excited to have landed a job so close to his home and responsibilities on the Farm, he arrives ready to help the teenagers he surrounds himself with daily. The last thing he expects is to run into Hope, the girl that had left Mama Jean's program without any explanation years before.

Before her death, Mama Jean, as she was fondly known by the foster children she took in, set in motion the plans for the Hertzel-Mendall Family Farm, a community established to offer homes to families that fostered children. The "farm" offers therapeutic, recreational and many other services all in one place to achieve the best outcomes for children in the foster care system. "Mama" Jean Hertzel fostered teenagers who had run out of options - teens who were considered unadoptable mostly due to their ages but sometimes for other reasons.