Chapter 13 - An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed

As I get increasingly older (and wiser, I hope) I find that I enjoy books about older people immensely. Sometimes I find it very hard to engage in books where the protagonist is in their 20's. Let's face it by the time you are past 50 you have probably done a lot of living and have experienced many, many more things than your average 20 to 30 year old. So for me these stories of older people are more relatable.

Enter authors who are writing these stories. Fredrik Backman's stories (A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Said to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt Marie Was Here), Marianne Cronin's The One Hundred Years of Lennie and Margot, and Rachel Joyce's delightful Harold Fry series all fit in this genre and I've told you about these before. Thankfully there are plenty of other authors who are stepping into the aging pond with clever, crafty older people as protagonists. Some good books by these authors are listed below.

This Is Your Life Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison - Seventy-eight year old Harriet Chance impulsively joins an Alaskan cruise that her late husband planned. While Harriet is hoping that the journey helps her move on, what she doesn't expect that during the voyage she will be revisiting her past and her relationship with her daughter. The novel is both funny and moving.

The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club series by Osman is really clever and funny and centers around four senior citizens who get together ostensibly to solve cold cases. In the previous two books (The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice), the cold cases heat up pretty quickly. The latest story is about a decades old cold case which leads the group to a local news legend and a murder with no body and, of course, no answers. While no casting details have been given as yet, The Thursday Murder Club is being made into a feature film by Stephen Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.

The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett by Annie Lyons - Eighty-five year old Eudora Honeysett is done with this noisy and confusing world where nothing is as it was when she was growing up. She has lived a full life and wants to go out on her own terms and so is making arrangements at an end of life center in Switzerland. Enter 10 year old Rose, a precocious child who drags Eudora and neighboring widower Stanley into her many adventures. This novel has been described as Me Before You meets Elinor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten - Swedish thriller novelist Helene Tursten has come up with the delightful character of Maud, an 88 year old curmudgeon who fights for what she wants and is not upset if a little murder comes into her life. This book is a series of cohesive stories about Maud and her adventures. A second book, An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, is the latest in the series.

Do you have any books about older people to share? Let me know!