Driving Miss Norma by Tim Bauerschmidt, Ramie Liddle

 256 pages

"When Miss Norma was diagnosed with uterine cancer, she was advised to undergo surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But instead of confining herself to a hospital bed for what could be her last stay, Miss Norma—newly widowed after nearly seven decades of marriage—rose to her full height of five feet and told the doctor, 'I’m ninety years old. I’m hitting the road.'

"And so Miss Norma took off on an unforgettable around-the-country journey in a thirty-six-foot motor home with her retired son Tim, his wife Ramie, and their dog Ringo."  --from the publisher

I thoroughly enjoyed this book full of encouragement to really live your life rather than just mark time. I give it four out of five stars.

Live a Little by Howard Jacobson

Live a Little: A Novel by Howard Jacobson --- 290 pages.

A bitterly funny story about the complexities of nonagenarian love by Jacobson, previous winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2010, often compared to the American writer Philip Roth.

James Walton, in the New York Review of Books even quoted Roth to describe the experience of reading Jacobson: 

"In Roth’s The Counterlife (1986), Nathan Zuckerman’s brother, Henry, complains that “reading Nathan’s books always exhausted him, as though he were having a very long argument with someone who wouldn’t go away”—which is precisely the effect that Jacobson seeks as well. “Any book worth reading,” Jacobson has said with his customary taste for hyperbole, “will have you arguing with it by the bottom of page one.”

As many times as I put the book down, though, I always picked it back up again. An unlikely Scheherazade meets a melancholy Prince in the twilight of their lives.

Click HERE to read the review in the New York Review of Books.

Click HERE to read the *review in Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from BookPage.

Click HERE to read the review from The Guardian US Edition.

The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick

The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick - 331 pages

Sixty-nine-year-old Arthur Pepper lives a simple life. He gets out of bed at precisely 7:30 a.m., just as he did when his wife, Miriam, was alive. He dresses in the same gray slacks and mustard sweater vest, waters his fern, Frederica, and heads out to his garden.

But on the one-year anniversary of Miriam’s death, something changes. Sorting through Miriam’s possessions, Arthur finds an exquisite gold charm bracelet he’s never seen before. What follows is a surprising and unforgettable odyssey that takes Arthur from London to Paris and as far as India in an epic quest to find out the truth about his wife’s secret life before they met—a journey that leads him to find hope, healing and self-discovery in the most unexpected places.