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"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family--their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog--is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions...

"Domenico Starnone's The Old Man by the Sea is a slim masterpieceof a novel about an 82-year-old Neapolitan man, Nicola, who has spent his entire life telling stories, becoming very, very good at it. In words, with his pen, in the notebook he carries with him everywhere, he records life's minutiae, its ephemera, those vibrating essences and almost imperceptible atoms of existence that most of us barely notice but that constitute the very stuff of...

If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said? At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He's alone, as usual, though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story. Over the course of this evening,...

"Two old friends reconnect in Dublin for a dramatic, revealing evening of drinking and storytelling in this winning new novel from the author of the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha Davy and Joe were drinking pals back in their Dublin youth. Davy rarely sees Joe for a pint anymore--maybe one or two when Davy comes over from England to check on his elderly father. But tonight Davy's father is dying in the hospice, and Joe has a secret that...

"An entertaining discussion" of the role memory plays in our lives as we age, including an interview with Oliver Sacks ( Times Higher Education Supplement ). When we can't call to mind the name of someone we've known for years, or walk into a room and forget what we came for, we start worrying. Are these lapses just "senior moments," or something serious like dementia? In this book, a renowned specialist explores the topic of memory in later life...

A sweeping novel about the last days of the lumberjacks is told by of one of the greatest lumberjacks of all who recounts tales rife with murder, mayhem, avalanches, and bootlegging in the tiny timber town of Cordelia, Idaho.

Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes...

Season by season, a young girl walks with her abuelo along the beach as he shares stories about his life in Havana.

"In 1971, a property speculator named Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine. Reflecting on his childhood in the early 20th century, Harley recounts that after his father's sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida-mere miles away from what would become Disney World-to join a community of Shakers. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor, faith, and charity,...

Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the...