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Fiction

The Middlesteins: A Novel

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By Jami Attenberg – Grand Central Publishing, 2012

When food is a substitute for love, what happens to the family? Richard Middlestein has just left Edie, his wife of 40 years, unwilling to abide any longer her lifelong addiction to food. Overweight since her Holocaust-surviving mother placated her with warm bread, Edie has every health condition associated with obesity. Despite dire admonitions from doctors, she shows no signs of compliance. The grown Middlestein children are distraught over their father’s abandonment. Contemptuous, often-inebriated daughter Robin sees for the first time how devastating her mother’s relationship with food has become. Henpecked son Lenny wants to keep the peace, while his rail-thin wife refuses Richard access to his spoiled grandchildren. Each deals with the fallout in ways that manage to be simultaneously funny and pitiful. The tale of the Middlesteins is fiction, but the message hits a hard note of truth in our weight-conscious culture.

Our Souls at Night

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By Kent Haruf – Knopf, 2015

If you are one of the lucky ones who has read award-winning author Kent Haruf (Plainsong, Eventide, Benediction), you’re familiar with his gift for making the simple profoundly rich. As with his other novels, this one takes place in the small town of Holt, CO. Addie Moore, a widow, and widower Louis Waters, both live alone; they know one another by sight, but not well. It is surprising, then, when Addie knocks on Louis’s door and suggests that, nighttime being so hard to bear alone, they simply sleep together. Sweetly awkward at first, their companionship blooms and they wrestle with and sort out their futures, not without disparaging neighbors and family interference. It’s tender, it’s funny. It’s one of those small novels that lives big in your heart and stays with you. A grand finale, indeed, for Haruf passed away before this gem was published.

The Sense of an Ending

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By Julian Barnes – Knopf, 2011 

Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, this profound novel is about a man forced to look back at an uncomfortable time in his life and ask himself if he is who he thinks he is. Tony Webster, now in his 60s, considers his life settled. He has a good relationship with his family; he is comfortable and at peace. He is quite surprised to find that a woman he once met only briefly—the mother of an old lover from school—has bequeathed him some money and a diary. Along with this gift reemerges the former lover with her version of that time in their lives. Her account makes Tony question the veracity not only of his memories but his self-image. What other memories has he finessed to the point of distortion? This tale is a provocative, psychological mystery—one might be tempted to read its 160 pages in one sitting. Don’t rush. Barnes has chosen each word thoughtfully for us to savor, and then to read again.

A Man Called Ove

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By Fredrik Backman – Atria, 2014

A Man Called Ove is a debut novel that will charm you like no other. Ove is estranged from his best friend, let go from his job and recently widowed from a wife he adored. He’d kill himself if everyone would just let him be. But that plan is foiled by new neighbors, local rule-breakers and curious children—even the cat interferes. So it could not get any more exasperating for Ove. This is a feel-good story that suggests it’s possible to hit the curve ball life throws at you, if you just get out of your own way. A more loveable curmudgeon may not exist. Fans of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and Olive Kitteridge looking to venture outside familiar American authors, your search is Ove-r. Backman’s Swedish bestseller has been translated into 25 languages. Read it in at least one of them.

Florence Gordon

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By Brian Morton – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014

Florence Gordon is an aging feminist and academic, an intolerant woman who wants to be left alone to write a memoir she thinks no one will read. Arriving at a restaurant to find a surprise 75th birthday party (her own), she leaves; she’d rather write. Yet solitude eludes her as her daughter-in-law and granddaughter arrive in town, and Florence is sucked into the drama that is her son’s fragile marriage. Her disdain for her son’s wife is met with adoration, although her granddaughter, distant but curious, can’t quite figure her grandmother out. And now, unimaginably, book reviews dub her a national treasure, and she is jettisoned into book tours and speaking engagements. She deals with a health crisis, her ex-husband’s envy of her success, a hip young editor, and her granddaughter as her assistant. Acerbic enough to make you wince, while witty and whip smart, Florence Gordon is a woman you will love, hate and remember.

Moving Day: A Thriller

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By Jonathan Stone – Thomas and Mercer, 2014

It’s a brilliant scam: uniformed thieves show up with a van, ahead of schedule, and pack up the house. When the actual movers arrive the next day, all possessions are long gone. But this time, the crooks messed with the wrong man. Stanley Peke is a 72-year-old Holocaust survivor who as a child was forced to find his way alone in the woods when the Nazis left him orphaned and homeless. Peke has successfully buried his past: he works hard, lives well and invests wisely. Incensed and refusing to be victimized again, Peke channels that resilient boy to cross the country, humiliate the thief and reclaim a lifetime’s worth of possessions. Moving Day is a psychological thriller with intelligent characters in a harrowing plot that shows just how far a man will go to keep his treasures and his pride.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

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By Jonas Jonasson – Hyperion, 2012

Impetuous Allan Karlsson dodges his centennial birthday celebration by escaping out the window of his nursing home. Walking in slippers to the nearby bus depot, he picks up a suitcase that a stranger asked him to watch and heads off to begin another chapter in a life already filled with adventures, both good and bad. Hilarity ensues when Allan discovers the suitcase contains a large, ill-gotten fortune and the victim needs to get it back. Allan’s resourcefulness comes from a long life that afforded him the opportunity to see many world events unfold, recalled with Allan himself in the thick of them, not unlike Forrest Gump. His experiences include building a nuclear bomb, fighting in the Spanish-American War and preventing the assassination of Winston Churchill. This is a happy-go-lucky tale with zany characters (Einstein’s brother!), improbable circumstances (an elephant!) and the most outrageous centenarian you’ll likely meet.

Rage Against the Dying

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By Becky Masterman – Minotaur, 2013

Retired agent returns to action to seek the one that got away. Don’t be turned off by the familiar theme of this fast-paced thriller—there is plenty of originality and suspense to make it worthwhile. For starters, at 59, tiny, white-haired, former FBI agent Brigid Quinn defies ageist stereotyping, and her chutzpah alone makes this an entertaining read. When Quinn thinks evidence from a string of murders isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, she goes rogue to find the killer of her one-time protégé. As she also struggles to honor her commitment to her new husband and the life they’ve created, demons from her glory days keep interfering. Suspects abound, but Quinn’s obsession could cost her her marriage—or her life. You may find yourself hoping Quinn stays out of retirement for plenty of sequels. (Silver Century readers may be intrigued to know that the author met with a harsh rejection at first: an agent told her that “Nobody is interested in a woman older than 30.”)

The Girl Next Door

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By Ruth Rendell – Scribner, 2014 

If you haven’t read anything by award-winning British mystery writer Ruth Rendell, wait no longer. You have plenty to choose from. When she died at 85, Rendell’s titles numbered about 70. In The Girl Next Door, there’s no mystery about whodunnit. We know from the beginning that in the 1930s a man got away with killing his wife while the neighborhood children, playing in an underground tunnel, seemed unaware of any crime being committed. Decades later and now in their 70s, the friends, who long ago had gone their separate ways, reunite at the news that a cookie tin containing bones from the hands of a man and woman has been unearthed in their secret tunnel by construction workers. Whose bones are they? Rendell deftly brings us into the life of each character. Together again, the childhood friends revisit alliances, disagree, fall in love and, yes, evolve. No one here is defined by their age. Brilliant, rich and anything but a traditional crime novel.

The Woman Upstairs

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By Claire Messud – Knopf, 2013

Nora is a schoolteacher in her early 40s; she has never married, and she feels invisible, discarded. And boy, is she angry. Is that because her life’s dream of becoming an artist took a backseat to her role as a devoted daughter? Called upon to advocate for a student, she falls in love with the boy’s family collectively and individually, each member awakening a part of Nora that had been dormant. Now she can see possibility where there was none. Nora imagines the boy as her own, the husband as her lover. Enamored with the boy’s mother, Nora shares a studio with her and creates art again. Her passion is unbridled until an unexpected event shatters Nora. A rich, psychological thriller about second chances gone awry.