In Spring Green, Wisconsin, spinster sisters Milly and Twiss have spent their lives listening to heartbeats and heartaches, nursing birds and the people who bring them back to health.
 
Back in the summer of 1947, Milly and Twiss knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally broken. Milly was known as a great beauty with emerald eyes and Twiss was a brazen wild child who never wore a dress or did what she was told....

If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said? At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He's alone, as usual, though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story. Over the course of this evening,...

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend...

Stand aside, Bridget Jones. Here comes sassy curmudgeon Mary Sharp. Don't pester Mary about taking parasailing lessons, Italian-language courses or joining a gym. She may be a little creaky in the bones as she heads for the Big 6-0, but she's fine with it. Mary has already led an exciting life--she came of age in the 60s, after all. Now, with a new grandchild and a new man on the horizon, all she wants is to enjoy this new phase of her life.

"Andrew Holleran's unique literary voice is on full display in this poignant story of lust, dread, and desire--the first novel in thirteen years from one the most acclaimed gay authors of our time"--

An old woman who has outlived all her friends is reluctant to become too attached to the stray dog that visits her each day.

"A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England, which is 'her last love'. She wants to 'see it all before she dies'. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son,...

Although Cora has become too old to haul a sled with the other dogs, she proves that she can still help the family bring in the Christmas tree from the forest.

"Dov and Yitzhak live in a small village in the mountains of Hungary, isolated both from the world and from the horrors of the war. But one day in 1944, everything changes. The Nazis storm the homes of the Jewish villagers and inform them they have one hour. One hour before the train will take them to Auschwitz. Six decades later, from the safety of their living rooms at home in Israel, the brothers finally break their silence to a friend who will...

Bernie Moon's ambitions and dreams have been forgotten by everyone else - including Bernie herself. At 19 she was full of promise, but now facing 50 and going through the menopause, she's a fading light. Until the murder of a woman in a local park unlocks a series of childhood memories, and with them, a talent that she has hidden all her adult life. What happens when the frustrations and power of an older woman are finally given their chance to be...