I have prepared a list of book featuring older women at the centre of the story. I have tried to include books from various parts of the world: Nigeria, Ukraine,Argentina, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, England, Italy and Germany and written mainly by female writers. I hope you will find this list of use when choosing your next title to read.
1 An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine (Lebanon)
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alemaddine tells a story of an introverted 72-year-old woman, Aaliya who lives in Beirut. She is a recluse who lives her life through literature. It is a portrayal of an older woman who looks back at her life and tries to determine whether her life was meaningful, whether her life was ‘necessary’. This tale is a confession of an introvert, a love letter to literature. This book is full of reflections on loneliness, disconnection, treatment of the outsiders by the society, especially older women. An Unnecessary Woman is full of the nuanced musings, inner monologues on life of an older woman who has decided to defy social norms to live in accordance with her true herself. FULL REVIEW
2 Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika (Nigeria)
Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by the Nigerian writer, Sarah Ladipo Manyika is a life-affirming novel exploring ageing, personal independence, debilitating illnesses that affect us as we grow older, loneliness, friendship, loss, immigration, the importance of books in one’s life and the position of older women in the society. We meet the main protagonist of this novel, a 75-year-old Nigerian woman Morayo da Silva when she lives in a small flat in San Francisco. Fiercely independent with a cosmopolitan outlook on life, a former professor of English and literature, Morayo has a profound love for her books and considers writers her friends. She has been living in a rented one-bedroom flat for the last twenty years and knows “all the comings and goings” of the building she lives in. She drives a vintage 993 Porsche, loves wearing pearls not only on special occasions but also when running daily errands. In her wardrobe there is “a stack of brightly coloured fabrics”, and the older she gets she more enjoys “wearing [Nigerian] native attire” in vibrant shades of pink and blue which reminds her the smells of Lagos markets. Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun is a portrayal of a woman full of life and plans for the future, who is not restricted by social norms or outdated concepts of what people of certain age should or should not be doing. Life is a real adventure for Morayo where one can indulge in art, literature, food, culture, romantic relationships, and friendship. It does however not mean that she had not encountered difficulties or loneliness in her life.Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun is a life affirming novel exploring the position of an older woman in the society who tries her best to live her life on her own terms, unfazed by social constructs and concepts. FULL REVIEW
3 Distant View of A Minaret by Alifa Rifaat (Egypt)
Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifaat (1930 – 1996) is a collection of fifteen short stories depicting lives of women within a traditional Muslim society. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that the women portrayed in Rifaat’s stories are at different stages of their lives, with a particular focus on the women of an older age. We follow the stories of middle-aged mothers, widows, single older women who are all constrained by the norms imposed by the society they live in. The main subjects in these stories are marriage, death, sexual fulfillment, physical and emotional abuse, loneliness of loveless life, the inability to communicate one’s feelings to others, ageing and relationship between husband and wife from woman’s perspective portrayed within the religious norms and moral values of Islam. FULL REVIEW
4 Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym (England)
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym published in 1977 (and nominated for the Booker Prize) is a poignant exploration of loneliness.This is a story of four single people including two elderly women in their 60s: Marcia, Letty, Edwin and Norman who have worked together for several years in an office in Central London doing unspecified clerical work. They don’t socialise together out of work, they don’t have any close relatives, they live alone and lead what one could define as a rather quiet life. Romantic love has never been a part of their lives. Despite their advanced age, two of them still live in rented single rooms. Barbara Pym is an excellent chronicler of an ordinary and unnoticed life with focus on single elderly people and their fate as they face health problems as well as housing and financial insecurity. Quartet in Autumn is a thought-provoking character study which portrays an emotional baggage that people carry as they grow older facing isolation and loneliness. FULL REVIEW
5 Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets (Ukraine)
This series of short stories explores the lives of Ukrainian women, displaced, forced to seek refuge in other parts of Ukraine as a result of the war in Eastern Ukraine which started in 2014. Some stories take place in Kyiv, some in a war zone, and others in the territories occupied by the Russia-backed separatists. All these snapshots of a singular life presented in those stories focus on how traumatic historical events transform one’s everyday life, how military and political turmoil upends the lives of the ‘ordinary’ women who endured so many senseless losses. Stories depict the lives of women those who are completely lost, confused living in a confused reality. We meet the midwife in her 50s. We meet an older, affluent, educated, lonely woman who used to run a major company in Eastern Ukraine and now with her home and company destroyed, she is working as a cleaner in Kyiv. We witness an older woman who loses her ability to walk in the middle of the street because of trauma. We meet an older woman who must take up three jobs in Kyiv to survive. We meet a woman with a degree in economics and an interest in arts and culture who cannot find a suitable job, but her bills are piling up. She lives in constant stress of not having enough money on top of dealing with trauma of being a displaced – out of place person. In one of the stories, the protagonist mentions that we, as a society, love celebrating women but only a certain type of women. We often forget about the women ‘in some backwater, small places, remote places’ – they are often invisible, especially older women, disabled women, single women. FULL REVIEW
6 Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri (Italy)
Written in forty-six short vignettes, Whereabouts portrays daily wanderings and inner workings of the narrator’s mind who is a solitary unnamed woman in her mid -40s working as a teacher and living in the unnamed city in Italy. Whereabouts is an exploration of urban solitude, alienation, loneliness, growing old, with the narrator’s beautiful ruminations and perceptive thoughts infused with a profound sense of nostalgia veiled in gentle melancholy. The narrator is a very sensitive and astute observer of other people’s words, emotions, and gestures. She often reflects on how we cross our paths with others on our daily errands, often without exchanging any words, often just having the presence of other person as a reference point. At the doctor’s office, she notices a woman, who appears to be twenty years older than her, also waiting alone, with no husband, no companion to support her which makes the narrator reflect on her own future in a few decades from now on. There is a very interesting depiction of the silence in the book which induce some sort of solace and calmness. That presence of aloneness on the pages of Whereabouts is very soothing for the reader. Whereabouts is a profoundly life-affirming book about tranquility that solitary existence might offer in the similar way how our narrator experiences it – an older woman who lives a peaceful life, with no family of her own, deeply aware of her loneliness, but not burden by it. In many aspects, this book conveys universal existence, eradicating those geographical belongings and identities.FULL REVIEW
7 Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp (Germany)
Marzahn, Mon Amour is a novel based on the author’s own life experiences. It tells a story of a woman in her mid-40s who after her novel was turned down by twenty publishers leaves her career as a writer to retrain as a chiropodist in the suburban borough of Berlin called Marzahn created in the 1970s which is known for the high-rise Communist blocks of flats. Marzahn explores the meaning of ageing, the importance of close-knit community, human touch, the need for warmth, affection as well as of small daily gestures of kindness. It serves as a reminder that ordinary lives often marked by brutal historical and political events are deeply meaningful. While working as a chiropodist our protagonist meets a wide variety of clients, mostly the elderly who share their life stories, anecdotes, daily struggles during the session when our protagonist takes care of their feet. She is a meticulous, sensitive listener and a profoundly compassionate observer of the uniqueness of ordinary life. Each chapter offers deep insight into the daily lives of the elderly inhabitants of Marzahn. Often their pension is minimal, they hold strong and clear opinions, and they don’t see themselves as victims despite their fragile bodies and often painful lived experiences. They are fiercely independent and very protective of their own independence: some have already paid for their funeral to ensure their own independence until the end of their journey. This is a thoughtful mediation on ageing and the perception of women “ashamed of their ageing bodies” by the society once they are forty years old when “the invisibility befalls [them]”. I particularly found the descriptions of women taking part in the Chiropody course very moving. These are often women experienced and exhausted by life who knew “what failure felt like”. They were “middle aged mothers, eager and obedient, nameless players in a nameless midfield, relegated to the footnotes of [their] own lives”. They were “all humble, modest and subdued, ready to forget [their] previous lives, erase [their] accomplishments and start again with clean sheets”. FULL REVIEW
8 The Teacher by Michal Ben Naftali (Israel)
The Teacher tells a story of a woman in her 60s, Elsa Weiss, born in 1917, a Holocaust survivor from Eastern Europe who after WWII ends up living in Israel working as a high school teacher until she commits suicide in 1982 at the age of 65. It is a story shared by many Holocaust survivors – I read that the author of the book based Elsa’s life on the person she knew in her real life.We learn about Elsa Weiss from the perspective of her former student who tries to trace Elsa’s life and learn more about her former teacher thirty years after Elsa jumps to her death from the roof of the building she lived in Tel Aviv. Emotionally paralysed by what she saw and experienced in Bergen -Belsen, Elsa suffered from an internal turmoil for the rest of her life, often faced with indifference of people around her in the post-war existence. Elsa Weiss felt abandoned through her entire adult life with an overwhelming sense of orphanhood, living in fear of forgetting her loved ones. Ben -Naftali weaves a story of an individual life whose existence was greatly affected by the external forces. The protagonist of Michal Ben- Naftali’s book shared the fate of many other survivors including of Jean Amery, an Austrian – Belgian Jewish writer, born in 1912, a Holocaust survivor, imprisoned in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen – Belsen, committed suicide in 1978 at the age of 65 – the same as Elsa Weiss when she took her own life. FULL REVIEW
9 Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco (Italy)
Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco is a poignant short story exploring themes of morality, a vicious cycle of revenge and violence, the destructive nature of war, its cruelty, savagery and its long legacy on the lives of its participants and survivors. Other themes include the existence of an individual within realm of the chaotic, unfair, and brutal world where the line between good and evil is often fluid and partially erased, the nature of truth and how we tend to believe in all the stories we hear and tell each other, without any further verification, as long as they fit into our own ideological understanding of the world. We witness the killing of a family for the reasons that will only be reveled later on. The young child, Nina was spared. More than fifty years after the killings, Nina tracks down Tito, a man who gunned down her father and brother but also the one who saved her. From the conversation they are having, we understand that Nina even though managed to have her own family, she spent the later part of her life in a mental institution, and was directly or indirectly involved in tracking and killing two other men who participated in slaying her family. While sitting together in the café, looking like an elderly couple: Nina in her 50s and Tito in his 70s both recall their lives, haunted by the past events, but both are unreliable narrators who use unreliable sources to tell their stories.Without Blood portrays the predicament of an individual thrown into the savagery of war and how one singular traumatic event in one’s life can have a profound impact on perpetrators, survivors and bystanders for the reminder of their lives as well as a future generation. FULL REVIEW
10 Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes (England)
Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes tells a story of Neil who recalls a friendship with his former elderly teacher, Elizabeth Finch who taught him a course on culture and civilisation for mature students when Neil was in his mid-30s. Following a one-year course, Neil continued his friendship with Elizabeth Finch for 20 years, meeting her twice or thrice per year for a lunch at a small Italian restaurant in West London. Their meeting lasted exactly 75 minutes where they discussed literature, history. and events from Neil’s life. Elizabeth Finch is also a loving ode to teachers, and the idea of exploring our own assumptions about the world we live in. “She had been my friend, and I had lover her. Her presence and example had made my brain change gear, had provoked a quantum leap in my understanding of the world.” The character of Elizabeth Finch was probably inspired by Julian Barnes’ friend, a wonderful writer and professor of history of art, Anita Brookner. Elizabeth Finch was a Romantic-Stoic, an inspiration to her students according to Neil, full of warmth, empathy, and with uniquely inquisitive mind and timeless intellectual curiosity, “unfit for the world”, with her high-mindedness often making her vulnerable. She is one of my beloved older characters in literature FULL REVIEW
11 Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro (Argentina)
Elena Knows is a compelling story about the age, illness, our changing body as we grow older, a parent – adult child relationship, religious and societal dogmas and prejudice faced by women. Elena is a woman in her 60s suffering from the Parkinson’s disease who sets on a journey across Buenos Aires to investigate the death of her daughter, Rita. We witness how the Parkinson’s disease affects Elena’s day to day existence and how her daily life is dependent on the schedule of taking medications. Elena Knows is a nuanced exploration of an older age with all the difficulties that one faces when they reach the full maturity.
12 A Start in Life by Anita Brookner (England)
A Start in Life evolves around the story of 40-year-old Ruth Weiss whom we follow in London, Oxford, and Paris. She looks back at her life in order to understand why she feels so unhappy with her existence. She analyses her childhood, her relationship with her parents and people she has chosen to surround herself with and her career. The theme of how the external circumstances might shape one’s existence and if an individual can do anything to change it prevails here. Even when given a chance to change the course of her life, Ruth is unable to do so – as life is not simple; it is nuanced and multifaceted. To me, this is a very life-affirming novel depicting a mature, independent woman reflecting on her life and understanding that there is no perfect existence; there are regrets in life but it does not mean that the life does not have a value.