The best books featuring older characters who will warm your heart

From the whimsical cover to the idea that a seemingly ordinary person is capable of extraordinary deeds (a recurring theme in my own work) I knew instantly this was my kind of novel. Harold Fry, 65, retired and living an unremarkable life in suburbia, sets out to post a letter, and keeps on walking. His stroll to the mailbox turns into a 600-mile pilgrimage – to deliver a letter to a dying woman – and takes in much of the beautiful and familiar landscape of my native Britain. I fell easily into step with this charming character and the community that slowly builds around him. Although driven by regret and the search for atonement, Harold’s journey – both physically and emotionally – is ultimately an uplifting one, told with the perfect balance of humor and pathos. 

Kent Haruf’s final novel opens with lonely widow Addie Moore appearing on the doorstep of her neighbour, widower Louis Waters, with a proposal: that they spend the night together rather than sleep alone. Addie says, “The nights are the worst. Don’t you think?” I bought the book based purely on that intriguing premise. Unsurprisingly, what begins as a chaste relationship, built on friendship and a way to make sense of the past, soon develops complications. There is gossip (naturally), and their adult children disapprove (naturally), but Addie and Louis prove that age is no barrier to finding love or enjoying physical intimacy. And the writing! The spare yet eloquent prose in this short novel is nothing short of a masterclass in how so few words can convey so much humanity. 

A seventy-year-old mystery is solved by an eighty-year-old who can’t remember to drink the cup of tea she’s just made, or even recognize her own daughter. This is a book I wish I’d written! Emma Healey’s darkly comic yet gripping novel was a deserved bestseller and has remained with me long after I first read it. Maud, the unlikely heroine, is an unreliable narrator (no spoiler there) but one that reveals how society too often belittles and patronizes people living with dementia. In trying to make sense of the clues she hopes will lead her to her missing friend Elizabeth, she inadvertently solves an older, darker mystery surrounding the disappearance of her long-lost sister. Maud is infuriating yet irresistible, epitomizing the kind of older character I love to see prevail.

I simply couldn’t resist the combination of the title of this book – a nod to Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 ¾, which I enjoyed many years ago – and its ironic setting of an Amsterdam aged care home. The novel is supposedly an exposé by an anonymous care home resident, although the author was subsequently revealed as Dutch writer, Peter de Smet. Told in the form of a diary, the book portrays the frustrations, indignities, and occasional small victories of Hendrik and his buddies in the Old-But-Not-Dead-Yet club as they fight to maintain agency over their own lives. The interplay between self-deprecating humor and poignancy in exploring the important themes around old age had me laughing out loud on one page and shedding tears on the next. 

The author of this novel is, like me, a doctor-writer. I imagine we share the same motivation to tell stories. As a psychiatrist, Joanna Cannon’s writing portrays her compassion and deep understanding of the human condition. In this novel, the mundane existence of eighty-four-year-old Florence in her care home is upset by the arrival of a man she is convinced she recognizes from her past, a man who supposedly died years before. Only her lifelong friend, the eponymous Elsie believes her. My favorite author Somerset Maugham (also a doctor) attributed his success as a writer to his powers of observation rather than his imagination. What makes this novel so compelling in my eyes are the astute observations and the easily overlooked details that hold the clues to solving the mystery.