Oldster Bookshelf #4
An occasional series, featuring books submitted by Oldsters and others.
Readers,
Welcome to another edition of The Oldster Bookshelf. Once again, please keep these caveats in mind:
I will likely not have read most of the books I feature in Oldster Bookshelf. I have only one brain, and it is very busy editing Oldster and Memoir Land. I will have read descriptions of the books, which have come to me via the authors and their publicists, or people other than the authors recommending them to me, or via the ether.
I will not be able to feature everyone who emails me at the submissions email, oldsterbookshelf@gmail.com. I will feature only those books that sound like they’ll be of interest to Oldster readers. Please be understanding about this.
Please be patient, as I will only be able to feature a limited number of books per installment, and the series will be occasional. If your book isn’t in this edition, it’s possible it could show up later. But I cannot go back and forth about it over email. I am too busy with everything else I’m publishing. Thank you for understanding.
Scroll to the bottom of this post for instructions on submitting your book for consideration. ⬇️
Click here to get more out of this email by reading it online instead of in your email.
Oldster is a lot of work and runs on paid subscriptions. You know what to do…
Alright, with no further ado, I give you the fourth edition of the Oldster Bookshelf, with something for just about everyone. Under each cover image is the author’s preferred buy link.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
Originally Published in October, 2014 by Metropolitan Books
This book has been out for a dozen years, but my dad keeps recommending it, saying that he finds it incredibly useful at 91. So I thought I’d share about it with you.
“Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients' anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.
In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Here he examines its ultimate limitations and failures—in his own practices as well as others'—as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life—all the way to the very end.”
The End of My Life is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker by Annabelle Gurwitch
Published in March by Zibby Media
“After Annabelle Gurwitch received an out-of-the blue diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer, an existential dread set in. Precision medicine offered a temporary reprieve—but instead of turning into a cancer warrior, Annabelle declared herself a cancer slacker. Her motto: no runs, no ribbons, no religion.
Told with her signature wit, warmth, and gimlet eye, Gurwitch draws inspiration from Greek mythology and TV comedies, Kermit the Frog and Samuel Beckett. She accidentally acquires an angel, embraces being in it “just for the sex,” and finds herself on a European van tour selling merch for a heavy metal band.
In this hilariously and deeply affecting meditation on mortality, the actress and activist illuminates life with chronic disease, inequities in care, and celebrates tiny victories, the crusty ends of baguettes, the discreet pleasure of sucking at a hobby, and the unshakable bond of female friendship. She upends the notion of living each day as if it were your last, as she discovers you can carpe too much diem, embracing, instead, the extraordinariness of the ordinary.”
Check out an adapted excerpt from Gurwitch’s earlier book, You’re Leaving When? Adventures in Downward Mobility, published in Oldster a few years ago:
This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk by Paul Taylor
Published in April by Brutus Books
“In This Is Getting Old, Paul Taylor tells two intertwined stories. One is the tale of a long marriage shaped by time, as he and his wife navigate the realities of aging in the Adirondack community where their story began. The other is a candid reckoning with the Baby Boom generation, what it was given, what it got wrong, and what it leaves behind. Blending memoir with cultural and political insight, this is a thoughtful, often funny, sometimes painful, and ultimately hopeful reflection on love, legacy, and the country we pass on to those who follow.”
Paul Taylor has been a journalist, public opinion survey researcher, demographer, and media reformer. He served as Executive Vice President of the Pew Research Center, where he directed all polling on social, demographic and generational trends. He was a reporter for The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Twin City Sentinel.
Where the Girls Were: A Novel by Kate Schatz
Published March 3rd by The Dial Press
“It’s 1968, and the future is bright for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth “Baker” Phillips: She’s the valedictorian of her high school, with a place at Stanford in the fall and big dreams of becoming a journalist. But the seductive free-spirited San Francisco atmosphere seeps into her carefully planned, strait-laced life in the form of a hippie named Wiley. At first, letting loose and letting herself fall in love for the first time feels incredible. But then, everything changes.
Pregnancy hits Baker with the force of whiplash—in the blink of an eye, she goes from good girl to fallen woman, from her family’s shining star to their embarrassing secret. Without any other options, Baker is sent to a home for unwed mothers, and finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house packed with pregnant girls who share her shame and fear. As she grapples with her changing body, lack of choice, and uncertain future, Baker finds unexpected community and empowerment among the ‘girls who went away.’”
Where the Girls Were is a timely unearthing of a little-known moment in American history, when the sexual revolution and feminist movement collided with the limits of reproductive rights—and society’s expectations of women. As Baker finds her strength and her voice, she shows us how to step into your power, even when the world is determined to keep you silent.”
Kate Schatz is a feminist author from California. She’s the New York Times bestselling author of Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, with W. Kamau Bell, and the “Rad Women” book series (including Rad American Women A-Z, Rad Women Worldwide, and Rad American History A-Z). Her book of fiction, Rid of Me: A Story, was published as part of the cult-favorite 33 1/3 series.
The Best Women’s Travel Writing: True Stories From Around the World, Volume 13 edited by Lavinia Spalding
Published June 9th by Travelers’ Tales/Solas House
“The newest collection in this award-winning series from Travelers’ Tales invites you to join twenty-seven inspiring and thoughtful writers as they traverse the planet, crisscrossing all seven continents and exploring the ways travel can illuminate, heal, inform, and transform a life.
The essays probe themes as diverse as the locations, immersing us in experiences of kindness, adventure, nature, friendship, strength, marriage, motherhood, spirituality, the environment, belonging, healing, history, identity, romance, and resilience.”
Lavinia Spalding has edited six previous editions of The Best Women’s Travel Writing. She is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Keeping Traveler and the co-author of With a Measure of Grace, This Immeasurable Place, and two editions of the Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans. She contributed an essay to Memoir Land.
Don’t Buy What I’m Selling: On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self by Lu Chekowsky
Published June 9th by Little, Brown & Company
“Don’t Buy What I’m Selling is a dishy peek behind the curtain of a billion-dollar industry, but it’s also the journey of one former ad executive who lived a life of contradictions—until she couldn’t anymore.
Part memoir, part manifesto, this is the ‘fascinating, smart, and hilarious look’ (Christie Tate) of a woman determined to go deep inside advertising so she could save the world—and herself. What could possibly go wrong?”
The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders by Seth Masket
To be published June 18th by Cambridge University Press
I’m excited for this one from my smart political scientist cousin SMOTUS (“Seth Masket of the United States), who writes a smart, humor-infused newsletter called the @smotus report here on Substack. Join us for a Substack Live discussion about it on June 18th at 2pm ET!
“The 2024 nomination of Donald Trump was both predictable and wildly unusual. Parties almost never nominate someone who has previously lost the presidency - let alone a candidate who helped organize a riot and faced dozens of criminal indictments. Why, then, did Republicans nominate Trump for a third time?
In this fascinating follow-up to Learning from Loss, leading scholar and political analyst Seth Masket conducted surveys and interviews with local Republican leaders across the country between 2021 and 2024. He finds that most were deeply wary of nominating Trump again but had lost any control they once had over their party to a passionate core of voters.
The Elephants in the Room captures a political party in the act of making a fateful decision; attempts to understand what has happened within the Republican Party in recent years by focusing on the people most critical to it; and looks at how the party has changed, what we should be learning from it, and how the US political system has changed as result.”
Mrs. Benedict Arnold: A Novel by Emma Parry
Published by Zando on April 28th
I recently heard the author give a sharp, funny reading from this at my local indie, Rough Draft Bar & Books, and fell in love. I can’t wait to read it.
“A riveting reimagining of the young woman who almost ended the American Revolution.
Philadelphia in the 1770s. Peggy Shippen longs for the war she’s living through to end. Though not always appreciated at home, she finds her curiosity is welcomed by a lively and influential circle of friends, including a glamorous rising star in the British army, Captain John André.
When the war separates them, Peggy is devastated—both by his absence and the horrors of ongoing conflict—before finding consolation in a man whose heroics for the Patriots have captured the world’s imagination: General Benedict Arnold.
As she trades Loyalist balls for Patriot salons, entertaining the most prominent figures of early America, and navigating the country’s lethal political currents, she conceives of an audacious scheme to achieve peace and her family’s survival, unleashing what would become the most famous act of treason in history.
When uncertainty and bloodshed are the only constants, Mrs. Benedict Arnold asks, how far will one woman go for safety?”
Alan Opts Out: A Novel by Courtney Maum
Published June 2nd by Little, Brown and Company
“In this timely and comedic take on ambition, consumerism, and the sticker price of privilege, an ad exec who bombs the biggest pitch of his career decides to forgo capitalism and live off the land of his suburban Connecticut home.”
Courtney Maum is the author of five previous books, including the romantic comedy Touch (New York Times Editors’ Choice) about a tech worker’s efforts to reclaim her humanity and the memoir The Year of the Horses chosen by the Today show as one of the best reads for mental health awareness. The author also of the groundbreaking publishing guidebook Before and After the Book Deal and the bestselling Substack newsletter by the same name, Maum is an educator and writing coach helping people hold on to the joy of art making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands.
Lovers XXX: A Novel by Allie Rowbottom
Published June 2nd by Soho Press
“Los Angeles, 1982. Eighteen-year-old Jude, newly out of reform school, is searching for her best friend, Winnie, when she falls under the spell of an older man with a motorcycle, a needle, and a taste for danger.
What begins as an escape spirals into motel rooms, stickups, and drug binges. Jude eventually finds Winnie, now Velvet, dancing at a Sunset Strip club. Together they imagine a future—bartending, writing, building a life of their own—but the same world that offers glamour and freedom threatens to consume them. Survival means navigating men who promise love, power, and escape—always at a cost.”
London Sojourn: Rewriting Life After Retirement by Rebecca Knuth
Published in January by She Writes Press
“What happens when a burnt-out professor trades academia for a fresh start in the city of her dreams—only to find reinvention far tougher than she imagined?
At 65, Rebecca Knuth walks away from the security and status of academia, determined to reimagine herself in London. She craves more—more creativity, more stories, more life. Immersing herself in the city’s literary and cultural world, she enrolls in a creative nonfiction masters program, trains as a guide, joins the prestigious London Library, and reclaims her voice as a writer. London becomes her muse, a place of transformation where shedding her old identity is inseparable from rebuilding herself as a woman. But change is never simple.
Her mother’s health declines. Rebecca lands in intensive care. She’s harassed on the Underground. Exhaustion takes hold. Doubt creeps in—about her ambition, her motivation, even her sense of belonging. Where exactly is home?”
Love in the Afternoon and Evening: Essays and Conversations on Soap Operas by Charlotte Druckman and Mayukh Sen
Published in May by W. W. Norton & Company
“Part cultural analysis, part backstage tour, Love in the Afternoon, and Evening is a love letter to a misunderstood, often-dismissed American genre. Critics, friends, and soap obsessives Charlotte Druckman and Mayukh Sen invite readers into a conversation that ranges from topics both serious (race, reproductive rights, queerness) and fun (fashion! long-lost daughters! evil twins!). Like any great soap, they structure their essays for surprise and emotional payoff, including interviews with divas Susan Lucci (All My Children) and Erika Slezak (One Life to Live), an exploration of the greatest soap satire ever made, deeper cuts like a Who’s Who of the best-of-the-best actors on Falcon Crest, and much more. Together, these thoughtful essays get to the bottom of what makes a soap, tracing a throughline to reality TV and the shows that continue to hook us day and night with drama and emotion. Love in the Afternoon, and Evening will make you want to bust out your shoulder pads and binge your favorite show all over again.”
The Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being by manoush zomorodi
Published in May by Flatiron Books
“From award-winning journalist and host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour Manoush Zomorodi, a timely investigation into how screens and sitting are reshaping our bodies―and how a simple shift can change everything.
In today’s world, a perfectly normal day means sitting in front of a screen for eight to ten hours. Meeting after meeting. Task after task. Email after email. If we’re not chained to our chairs, we’re attached to our devices, looking down at our phones and plugging in headphones. And then we go home, sit down on the couch, and scroll some more before going to bed and doing it all over again. Even children are not exempt: Many hours of their social and academic lives are spent on a screen.
We all know there has to be a better way—but what is it? In Body Electric, Manoush Zomorodi, host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour and the Body Electric podcast, draws on expert interviews, cutting-edge research, and real experiences from tens of thousands of everyday participants in her own citizen experiment to reveal the surprising physiological costs of our digital existences, from posture problems and dwindling eyesight to disrupted breathing and weight gain, and shares scientifically-backed, easy-to-manage tactics and solutions for better health and well-being. Along the way, she also debunks myths and misconceptions about what helps and hurts us, offers useful insights into the labs, offices, schools, and homes where small shifts are making big difference, culminating in an easy-to-apply protocol that will get us all moving.”
Caregiving for Your Parents: A Step-by-Step Guide for the Overwhelmed and Unprepared by Ilene Angel
Published April 15th by Lulu
“Caregiving for Your Parents is a clear, compassionate roadmap that shows adult children exactly how to navigate the emotional, medical, and practical realities of caring for their aging parents.”
Scavenging Beauty: A Memoir in Walks by Angelica Glass
To be published July 7th by Riverhead Books
“Angelica Glass spent decades as a social worker helping families struggling with poverty, addiction, abuse and neglect. Needing relief from work-related stress, she turned to walking as an outlet. What began as a way to incorporate more exercise into her busy life transformed into something extraordinary: a years-long odyssey in which Glass drew upon physical exercise, a close observation of the natural world, and long periods of introspection to reconcile with her own past.
Between moments of awe as she explored her community and documented what she saw with her camera, she grappled with the turmoil of her early years in a complicated, challenging family, the aging process, long-held insecurities, and grief.
Whether wandering through residential neighborhoods, over redwood-strewn mountain passes, or along the seashore, Glass found solace and developed a growing sense of peace. By looking to the natural world to suture old wounds — by scavenging beauty on her terms — she came to understand what it means to feel whole.”
Pool House: A Novel by Mary H.K. Choi
Published June 9th by Flatiron Books
“Bestselling young adult author Mary H.K. Choi debuts a brilliantly observed adult novel about mothers, daughters and the complexity of family set against the backdrop of Hollywood.”
Mary H.K. Choi is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ, and Elle. Check out her newsletter, choitotheworld.
Illegitimate: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth in the Shadow of Lebensborn by Maddie Lock
Published in March by Vine Leaves Press
“A powerful memoir about uncovering hidden origins, post-war secrecy, and a late in life journey to reclaim identity. Born in post-war Germany and adopted into an American military family, the author spent decades unaware of the truth behind her beginnings until a confession from her German aunt of being a ‘child created for Hitler’ led her into a deeply emotional search for the truth of her family lineage and her own biological father.”
Maddie Lock is a Central-Florida based author whose new book focuses on identity, family history, and the emotional impact of hidden truths. Her journey spans continents, archives and generations. She is the author of two children’s books, and her essays have been published in various journals and anthologies, including Under the Sun, The RavensPerch, Gravel, Ruminate, TulipTree Publishing and Unleash Press.
Such Dancing as We Can by Sydney Lea
Published in 2024 by The Humble Essayist Press
“[Oldster contributor] Sydney Lea’s Such Dancing As We Can is a compendium of one man’s ponderings on the events and changes in this world over the course of eighty-three years. Lea has devoted the greater part of those years to poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, but this collection of essays makes clear that other matters– chiefly devotion to wife, children, grandchildren and a handful of devoted friends and relations–are at very least as important as his art.
Lea’s deep knowledge of his beloved northern New England woods plays an essential role in Such Dancing As We Can; but there are other motifs as well. His long-term delight in blues, country and western, rock n roll, and what the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk called Black Classical Music (especially the work of late bop composers and performers like Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Miles Davis and others) informs many of his observations. The book finds genius and inspiration among people and in quarters that many of the nation’s elite wouldn’t tend to explore. Lea frequently meditates on the issues of race, American exceptionalism, class, privilege and inequity through his own personal experiences and the experiences of those he has encountered over the last four decades.”
Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist, Vermont Poet Laureate, founding editor of New England Review, and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, The Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. A new and selected poems is due in 2027.
He undertook Such Dancing As We Can, his seventh nonfiction collection, by way of exploring, among other things, the difference between his thoughts as a young man and his responses as an octogenarian to the same events and life-changing moments. Several of its essays first appeared in Oldster.
The Book of Pet Love and Loss: Words of Comfort and Wisdom from Remarkable People by Sara Bader
Published in June, 2023 by Simon & Schuster
“The Book of Pet Love and Loss is a collection of quotations—poignant thoughts and memories discovered in letters, journals, diaries, memoirs, and other original sources—from beloved cultural figures who understood this singular experience so deeply, they felt compelled to write about it. This book dignifies the profound connection we share with our animal companions, but it also provides solace as mourners document their heartache over the loss of their cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and other animals—even, in the case of Pablo Neruda, a mongoose. Their comforting and wise words are what every animal lover needs on this journey of heartbreak and healing.”
“We were a bit broken up over the death of our black Persian cat,” crime novelist Raymond Chandler confessed. “When I say a bit broken up, I am being conventional. For us it was a tragedy.” Nobel Prize–winning author V. S. Naipaul described the experience as “calamitous,” and writer May Sarton called it a “volcanic eruption of woe.” Poet Emily Dickinson was so bereft she asked for help: “Carlo died,” she announced in a letter to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1866. “Would you instruct me now?”
Sara Bader is an editor, writer, and researcher. She has worked as an acquisitions editor for Princeton Architectural Press and senior editor for Phaidon. In addition to editing visual culture books, she has conceived and researched quotation collections for both publishers, including The Designer Says, Art Is the Highest Form of Hope, and Every Day a Word Surprises Me, among others. In 2010, she launched Quotenik.com, a growing library of verified quotations.
We Had Fun and Nobody Died: Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter by Amy T. Waldman with Peter Jest
Published in June, 2024 by Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Great title!
“Tracing the life and career of longtime music promoter and club owner Peter Jest, this biography gives you an insider’s look at the Midwest music scene.
Authored by Amy Waldman, “We Had Fun and Nobody Died” looks beyond the profit-driven aspect of the music industry and celebrates a fiercely independent promoter whose love for music forged lasting friendships with artists of all genres—including John Prine, Arlo Guthrie (shown at left in the photo with Peter), the Violent Femmes, and many others. From world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands, the book is filled with photos, concert posters, tickets, and other memorabilia that bring Jest’s career to life.”
Come Again No More by David Wesley Williams
Published in November, 2025 by Jackleg Press
“Come Again No More is the story of Memphis newspaper reporter Charley Hull, latest casualty of a dying industry. It’s an elegy with heart and gallows humor, told in Charley’s lyrical and oft-profane voice. It begins with a wake and ends with a rebirth, and in between we see Charley confront the man who fired him, comfort himself with entirely too much bourbon and song, and cope with what’s left of a life given to a job he’s loved and lost.
This is David Wesley Williams’s third novel, and his most personal. He spent thirty-five years as a newspaper reporter and editor, mostly in Memphis, Tennessee, covering Olympic Games, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and much in between.”
Hazel Says No: A Novel by Jessica Berger Gross
Paperback edition published June 2nd by Hanover Square Press
“When Hazel Blum’s father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere town in Maine. But just as they begin to slowly acclimate to their new lives and connect with the town’s sprawling community, a dramatic fallout on the very first day of Hazel’s senior year tips the fickle balance of idyllic Riverburg and impacts everyone in her family. Emotionally deft, authentic, and compulsively readable, Hazel Says No is a debut novel not to be missed.”
Jessica Berger Gross is the author of the memoir Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Longreads, and many other publications. She lives in Maine with her husband and teenage son. Hazel Says No is her first novel. She took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire in 2025.
Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home by Kimberly Warner
Published in October, 2025 by Empress Editions
“When a midlife DNA test reveals that the man who raised her isn’t her biological father, Kimberly Warner is drawn into two parallel mysteries: one excavating the silence surrounding her beloved father’s death, the other tracing the absence of a stranger whose blood shapes her very being.As she unravels the secrets hidden beneath her family’s story, another rupture emerges—this time in her body. A mysterious illness takes hold, leaving her adrift in dizziness, and a growing awareness that her body knows truths language cannot hold.
Told through lyrical prose and imagined correspondence, Unfixed carries readers across decades and terrain, from the New Age spirituality of Warner’s 1980s childhood to the tidal unpredictability of midlife, where certainty dissolves and the soul insists on truth. This is not a memoir of resolution, but of reckoning. For anyone who has sought refuge in the known, Unfixed offers a quiet transformation: healing not as closure, but as relationship. Wholeness not as solidity, but as the willingness to remain present to what is.”
Kimberly Warner is a filmmaker, author, and patient advocate whose work explores what it means to live fully in a body that doesn’t always feel well. After studying pre-med and biology at Colorado College and pursuing graduate training in naturopathic and classical Chinese medicine, she veered from a clinical path toward a creative one, trading diagnostics for documentary and turning questions of health into stories of meaning.
In 2015, a rare neurological condition, Mal de Débarquement Syndrome, upended her sense of gravity and direction, quite literally. That seismic shift became the seed of Unfixed, a multimedia platform she founded to amplify stories of people living with chronic illness and disability. Since then, her work has grown into a celebrated portfolio of award-winning docu-series, short films, podcasts, memoir and essays—all championing the radical notion that healing and brokenness can coexist. That sometimes broken is the fix.
Afternoon: The Aging Guide for Beginners by Eva Tombak, illustrated by Victor Tombak
Published by Leisk on April 21st
“What does it actually feel like to grow old — and what should we do about it. Written from the inside of what Carl Jung called “the afternoon of life” — the years between fifty-five and eighty-five — Afternoon is a calm, unsentimental, and occasionally ironic guide to aging for readers who prefer honesty to comfort.
Eva Tombak, author and yoga teacher writing from Vilnius at sixty-six, looks directly at what most books about aging avoid: the real fear of dementia, the cruelties of ageism, the illusions of the longevity industry, the burden of caregiving, and the strange, quiet freedom of having less time ahead than behind. Drawing on conversations with doctors, caregivers, dementia specialists, and people in their eighties and nineties, she weaves personal memoir with cultural criticism, neuroscience, and philosophy.
This is not a how-to guide. There are no ten steps to a happy old age. What Afternoon offers instead is rarer — the courage to face aging without euphemism, and the wisdom to find meaning in it anyway.
Illustrated with darkly comic drawings by Viktor Tombak. For readers who are done being talked down to about getting old.”
The Common Uncommon: A Forest Journey by Bernd Heinrich
Published April 21st by W. W. Norton & Company
“For forty years, acclaimed scientist and best-selling author Bernd Heinrich has been ensconced in the woods of the northern, or boreal, forest, living in his log cabin amidst a vast sea of spruce, fir, and larch in the mountains of western Maine. According to Bill McKibben, ‘Heinrich is not just a great naturalist writer, he's a great writer, period.’
The Common Uncommon captures the rhythms of Heinrich’s seasonal life. From the forest he first encountered as a child of German refugees, Heinrich combines his powers of observation with professional expertise, as he notes the beautiful, but not entirely idiosyncratic characteristics of spiders, ants, chestnut trees, porcupines, owls, and mice. From the elusive single-cell organism called a euglena, which swims in fresh water and is part animal, part plant, to the resourceful wood frog, which nearly freezes into ice each winter while protecting its cells with glucose, Heinrich’s musings on life in the forest stunningly capture the five states of Being, Becoming, Interbeing, Remembering, and Returning.”
Triage: A Novel by Elisa M. Speranza
Published May 12th by Burgundy Bend Press
“When the ghosts of war won’t stay buried, a former Army nurse must find a way to heal-or risk losing everything.
In 1951 New Orleans, Laura Marino works as a nurse at Charity Hospital. She’s been home from World War II for six years, but peacetime has brought its own challenges. She’s frustrated at work, and her childless marriage to Nicholas, a surgeon she met in the Army, is strained.
Laura is devastated when news arrives that Frances, her best friend from the front, has taken her own life. Turning to the wartime journal she has kept hidden away, Laura is plunged back into memories of the bonds forged amid chaos on the front lines of North Africa, during the siege of Anzio, and at a refugee camp in Italy.
While her husband takes on an overseas assignment, Laura wrestles with her grief and guilt over Frances’ death. Then she meets Boyer, a wounded veteran who shares her pain. Their connection is intense-and dangerous, threatening to upend her life entirely.
Triage is an intimate portrait of a woman’s hard-won journey through love, loss, and a quest for redemption.”
And Then There Was Paris: A Memoir by Laurie Garnier
Published April 1st by Bashevis Press
“Eat Pray Love meets Bridget Jones meets Emily in Paris. Forty years old. Single. Convinced by her mother she was too fat to be loved. Then her boss James Patterson sent her to Paris.
This is the hilarious story of Laurie’s trials and tribulations in the world of dating in NYC following the abrupt end of her fifteen-year relationship. After becoming disillusioned with her life in the city and what feels like a dead end for any chance at love, she seeks a reset in Paris, France. While there, she meets Gerard at a party one night, and thus begins the one thing she never thought she would find—true love.”
“And Then There Was Paris is a well-written, honest and touching memoir that is funny as hell!” — James Patterson
Fancy Meeting You: A Novel by Louise Marburg
Published June 2nd by Blair Publishing
“FANCY MEETING YOU follows Laura Harrigan over her 50th year. She's childfree and ‘involuntarily unmarried,’ an impetuous liar who drinks too much and sleeps with men half her age, and she's still looking for The One.”
By 65-year-old acclaimed short fiction writer Louise Marburg.
To be considered for a future edition of the Oldster Bookshelf, you can email me at oldsterbookshelf@gmail.com with the following:
A press release.
A brief synopsis of the book.
A brief bit on your background as an author and how you came to publish it.
A cover image.
Your preferred buy link.
***You’ll be making my life easier if you keep it all short and sweet.
Thank you, Sari—what a treat! Newly retired, and summer in the South with new authors and books for my TBR list. Does being older get any more perfect than this🎉🎉
Loved Hazel Says No! Read it after reading Jessica's interview with Oldster.