The Mid-life Madness: Stories for People of a Certain Age
After the dot-com bubble burst, Dan Porter is laid off from his job and must decide what is truly important. His wife of twenty years, Jackie, a beautiful and successful managing director at a clothing designer shop, no longer connects with him. His teenagers, Josh, Nina, and Millie, are distant and confusing. Jackie is tempted by the attentions of a younger man at her office, and thanks to an opportunity suggested by a magazine article, Dan finds himself contemplating a drastic change in his life.
Bryson and an estranged and strange college chum decide to hike the Appalachian Trail...in their 40s without almost no physical preparation. If that's not humorous enough, the picture of the bear on the cover is connected to a passage in the book guaranteed to generate snorts for years to come.
Also available on audio.
About two people who have never been able to live without each other--and are suddenly forced to try...Examines that one moment--so common in long-term relationships--when one partner just has to get out, and the changes and growth that follow.
Looking for clues in a family history filled with three generations of mistaken marriages, dubiously fathered children, and hand-me-down sayings, Rebecca discovers she is just one piece of a family history that is still unraveling—-and she wonders if events of the past are destined to repeat themselves in her own child's future.
"When forty-three-year-old Fiona Edwards first sees the lanky backpacker striding up the lane toward her award-winning farmhouse bed-and-breakfast in the remote mountains of North Wales, she’s puzzled. She’s used to unexpected strangers, but few arrive on foot. The man to whom she opens her door is middle-aged, unshaven, sweat-soaked . . . and arrestingly handsome. What neither of them knows at that moment is that their lives are about to change forever. American Alec Hudson has carried the ashes—and the memory—of his late ex-wife, Gwynne, all the way from London’s Heathrow Airport, honoring her request that he scatter them atop a mountain they had climbed together years before—the same brooding peak whose jagged cliffs rise to the sky from the back pastures of Fiona’s farm. But the weather doesn’t cooperate, and as Fiona and Alec wait for it to clear, they are drawn together by mutual loss, longing, and the miracle of love at midlife."
"An elderly Russian woman now living in America, Marina cannot hold on to fresh memories...yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye…carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city."
Working as a quality control inspector at a toy factory in Rhode Island, friendless alcoholic Smithy Ide considers himself a loser until a tragic event prompts him to set off on an epic cross-country bicycle journey that promises him a final chance to become the man he has always wanted to be.
A middle-aged woman is forced to return to a home state she'd rather forget…and come to terms with a past filled with the shadows of her mother--a once vibrant femme fatale now suffering from Alzheimer's.
A discontented woman (married, with a teenage son, and fast approaching middle age) who dallies in her past--with startling, humorous, and bittersweet consequences.
