Age brings experience, wisdom, and stories worth celebrating. To mark the International Day of the Older Person on 1 October, we're sharing 12 books that shine a positive light on ageing - books that challenge stereotypes and spark conversations about later life.
From a Senior Citizens’ Social Club banding together with a daycare centre to save their local community space, to a memoir about an unexpected friendship with a 93-year-old neighbour formed over good food - these stories celebrate age, wisdom, and joy.
See something you'd like to read? Click the titles to reserve your copy.
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Fiction
1. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – Deborah Moggach (book)
Enticed by advertisements for a luxury retirement home in India, a group of strangers leave England to begin a new life. On arrival, however, they discover the palace is a shell of its former self, the staff are more than a little eccentric and the days of the Raj appear to be long gone. But, as they soon discover, life and love can begin again, even in the most unexpected circumstances.
2. A Spool of Blue Thread – Anne Tyler (audiobook on BorrowBox)
'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...' This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer's day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before.
From that porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red's father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century - four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their home...
3. The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp – Leonie Swann (book)
It's an eventful day at Sunset Hall, a house-share for the old and unruly, when the police arrive with news that a body has been discovered next door. Everyone, including Agnes, is secretly relieved that the body in question is not the one they're currently hiding in the shed (sorry about that, Lillith). Now the answer to their little problem with Lillith may have fallen into their laps. All they have to do is find out who murdered their neighbour, so they can pin Lillith's death on them, thus killing two old birds with one stone.
To investigate, the senior sleuths (not forgetting Hettie the tortoise) will tangle with sinister bakers, broken stair lifts, inept criminals and their own dark secrets.
4. A Man Called Ove – Frederik Backman (book)
At first sight, Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots - neighbours who can't reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d'etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents' Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets.
But isn't it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just so?
In the end, you will see, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible...
5. How to Age Disgracefully – Clare Pooley (book)
When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards.
The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide.
When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door—as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog—to save the building. Together, this group’s unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don’t catch up with them first.
6. Our Souls at Night – Kent Haruf (book)
In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf's inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbour, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis's wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with.
A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future.
7. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry – Rachel Joyce (book, audiobook on CD)
When Harold Fry nips out one morning to post a letter, leaving his wife hoovering upstairs, he has no idea that he is about to walk from one end of the country to the other.
He has no hiking boots or map, let alone a compass, waterproof or mobile phone. All he knows is that he must keep walking. To save someone else's life.
8. The One-In-A-Million Boy – Monica Wood (book)
The story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don't they teach you anything at school?
So says 104-year-old Ona to the 11-year-old boy who's been sent to help her out every Saturday morning. As he refills the bird feeders and tidies the garden shed, Ona tells him about her long life, from first love to second chances. Soon she's confessing secrets she has kept hidden for decades.
One Saturday, he doesn't show up. Ona starts to think he's not so special after all, but then his father Quinn arrives on her doorstep, determined to finish his son's good deed. The boy's mother is not so far behind. Ona is set to discover that even at her age the world can surprise you, and that sometimes sharing a loss is the only way to find yourself again.
Non-fiction
9. Breakfast with the Centenarians – Daniela Mari (book)
It's said that life begins at 40 - but that number is constantly revised upwards as we live longer and longer. With the number of centenarians having quadrupled in the last thirty years, more of us can now hope to reach the 100-year mark than ever before. But how can we navigate this journey with grace, dignity and style?
In this charming and informative book, Daniela Mari - the Italian doctor caring for some of the oldest people on the planet - draws on her experiences as a renowned gerontologist to reveal the science behind a healthy, happy old age. It turns out that the world's centenarians can teach us a thing or two about ageing well. And the secrets are not always what you'd think.
10. I Remember Nothing – Nora Ephron (book)
In her final book, Nora Ephron reflects on life, growing older, and everything she will and won't miss. Filled with Nora's trademark wit, wisdom and warmth.
* No one actually likes to admit they're old. The most they will cop to is that they're older. Or oldish.
* Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.
* I have been forgetting things for years-at least since I was in my thirties. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time. I have proof. Of course, I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it, or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.
11. Dinner with Edward – Isabel Vincent (book)
With its delicious food, warm jazz, and stunning views of Manhattan, Edward's home was a much-needed refuge for reporter Isabel Vincent. Her recently widowed ninety-something neighbour would prepare weekly meals for her, dinners Isabel would never cook for herself - fresh oysters, juicy steak, sugar-dusted apple galette. But over long, dark evenings where they both grieved for their very different lost marriages, Isabel realised she was being offered a gift greater than crisp martinis and perfect lamb chops.
As they progressed from meals a deux to full dinner parties with an eclectic New York crowd, she saw that Edward was showing her how to rediscover the joy of life. For even a shared bowl of chowder could transform loneliness and anxiety into friendship, freedom, and a pure, simple pleasure Isabel had not known she could find again.
12. The Golden Rule – Dr Lucy Pollock (book)
We are living longer lives, and have choices now as never before about how we will age. But what will make us happy? What changes, made right now, will help us to flourish as we age?
This book contains the invaluable lessons Dr Lucy Pollock has learnt from over thirty years of working with older people, from tales of loss, to impossible families, and the importance of learning to live with uncertainty.
Medical teams have not always heard the voices of older people or their loved ones. But if we are given power to influence the lives of our future selves, how best shall we use it?
