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James A. Michener · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce · 355 pages

Harold Fry has recently retired and now, he doesn't do very much. Even mowing the lawn, like his wife Maureen tells him to do, seems too much work for him. When, one day, he recieves a lettre in a pink envelope, this lazyness changes. In it, his collegue from long time ago, Queenie Hennessy, tells him she is going to die soon from a cancer in a hospice at the other end of England. Harold, at first

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Plainsong

Kent Haruf · 301 pages

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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Helen Simonson · 394 pages

You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major P

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The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Walter Mosley · 277 pages

Ptolemy Grey is a 91-year-old man, suffering from dementia and living as a recluse in his Los Angeles apartment. Then Robyn Small, a 17-year-old family friend, appears and helps clean up his apartment and straighten out his life. A reinvigorated Ptolemy volunteers for an experimental medical program that restores his mind, and he uses his last days--shortened now by the medical experiment--to del

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Rabbit at Rest

John Updike · 512 pages

It's 1989, and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is far from restful. Fifty-six and overweight, he has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, are giving him cause for concern. His son Nelson is a wreck of a man, a cocaine addict with shattered self-respect. Janice, his wife, has decided that she wants to be a working girl. And as for Pru, his daughter-in-la

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The Last Devil to Die

Richard Osman · 369 pages

The fourth installment in the beloved and New York Times bestselling series from Richard Osman, now streaming on Netflix “The best Murder Club book yet. . . A poignant complement to both the fair-play mystery plot and the characters’ lively humor.” —The New York Times Book Review It's rarely a quiet day for the Thursday Murder Club. Shocking news reaches them—an old friend has been killed, and a d

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Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

Elizabeth Taylor · 224 pages

"On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. "If it's not nice, I needn't stay," she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed. "Three elderly widows and one old man who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind" serve for her fellow residents, and there is the

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The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway · 127 pages

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.

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And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

Fredrik Backman · 96 pages

An exquisitely moving portrait of an elderly man’s struggle to hold on to his most precious memories, and his family’s efforts to care for him even as they must find a way to let go.

AgingElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
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Exit Ghost

Philip Roth · 304 pages

After eleven years of solitude working on his New England mountain as a writer, Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York to confront a turbulent city in the wake of September 11, as well as the aging Amy Bellette, one-time muse to his first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff.

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At Seventy: A Journal

May Sarton · 335 pages

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Perfume River

Robert Olen Butler · 272 pages

Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam War protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under

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Man in the Holocene

Max Frisch · 128 pages

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Insomnia

Stephen King · 787 pages

**RALPH ROBERTS IS SEEING SOME STRANGE HAPPENINGS IN DERRY, MAINE.** He sees auras around human beings that show him the horror threatening them. He sees a nice young research chemist like Ed Deepneau turn into a savage wife beater. He sees Charlie Pickering with blood in his eyes and a gleaming knife in his hand. And he sees three little bald doctors in the homes of the dying –

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Life After Life

Jill McCorkle · 418 pages

The residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life's most profound discoveries. What they eventually learn about themselves and one another will transform them all.

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The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If The Old Could

Doris Lessing · 510 pages

Jane Somers, a widowed, middle-aged journalist, describes the development of a chance friendship with an elderly woman and an improbable romance with a man Jane meets on the street

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Murder by Cheesecake: A Golden Girls Cozy Mystery

Rachel Ekstrom Courage · 336 pages

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A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan · 352 pages

Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many

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The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 245 pages

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

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The Vacationers

Emma Straub · 372 pages

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

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Driftless

David Rhodes · 429 pages

The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties th

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Killers of a Certain Age

Deanna Raybourn · 368 pages

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