45 books like The Marx Sisters

Embrace this beloved comic novel with seventy-five-year-old showgirl twins, Dora and Nora Chance. Dora recalls their bawdy existence of struggle and romance hours before partying with the toff side of the family, Shakespearean actor dynasty, the Hazards. The Chances grab life and joy from the wrong side of the tracks. Possibly fathered by actor, Sir Melchior, or his twin brother, the Chance twins struggled to make a living in the illegitimate theater of song and dance. Despite male lovers, their lives are shaped by women, like Hollywood starlet Delia, and the Lady A, both unfortunate wives of their putative father. Disabled and thrown out by cruel daughters, Lady A pops up as Wheelchair when taken in by the warm-hearted Chances. The kindness of women is what matters here.

Miss Austen is Cassandra, sister of the more famous Jane, who takes centre stage in this story, though Jane is there, too, as the beloved missed sister, not the novelist. The year is 1840, Jane has been dead for twenty years, Cassandra is in her sixties and though frail is on a quest to find some missing letters which may reveal secrets about Jane and Cassandra which must not be known. It’s a mystery and we want to know if Cassandra will find those letters, but it is also a touching portrait of sisterly devotion. Cassandra makes an admirable heroine, determined and resourceful despite her frailty. It also tells much about the way in which spinsters, usually ignored by society, have a rich and complex inner life.

The frame-tale—also known as a “story within a story”—is one of my favorite fictional devices, and Margaret Atwood’s deft handling of three separate storylines makes this book a truly astonishing read.

Though her characters are fictional, their story is set against a backdrop of major Canadian historical events of the 1930s and 1940s. The exterior tale carries Iris Chase, an unhappily married upper-class woman, from childhood to death, while the real author of the interior story—a novel about a pair of illicit lovers that contains an embedded science fiction tale (the eponymous Blind Assassin)—is one of the story’s biggest mysteries.

This novel is ambitious, engaging, and wholly surprising. 

THEME: Technically, this is not really a work of science fiction per se, even though it takes place in London 2013, twenty-one years before the book's publication. So it explores aspects of the future through a journey into the head of a serial killer and to the heart of murder itself. In the book, London at that time was a city where serial murder has reached epidemic proportions. To combat this raft of murders, the government has created a test to screen people for a predisposition to commit violent crimes. Tested at random, a man is shocked to hear that he fits the model. Yet when he breaks into the computer to erase his name, he discovers a list of his "brothers" a logical idea springs into his mind: What if to protect society he becomes a killer of serial murderers?

The inspector charged with tracking down this sociopath, code-named… show more.

Carrington’s surrealist masterpiece is a bit lighter than her other well-known novel, Down Below.

She tells the tale of someone not often seen, much less celebrated, in literature - the crone. At age 92, Marion Leatherby is given the gift of a hearing trumpet by her dear friend Carmella. It is only then she can hear that her family is planning on sending her to an institution.

Carrington’s fondness for the tarot (she even painted her own deck) can be found in the archetypal characters Leatherby encounters at the institution including the Abbess, the Snow Queen, and the Queen Bee among others.     

This book inspired me to write my own account of dealing with my mum’s Alzheimer’s.

This darkly comic yet gripping novel reveals the humorous aspects of the disease. Maud, an eighty-year-old who grapples with forgetting even the cup of tea she just made or recognising her own daughter, surprisingly unravels a seventy-year-old mystery.

The story delicately weaves warm and uplifting moments with touches of comedy, anxiety, and sheer terror that arise when one realises the advancing years and the struggle to be heard in a society that often overlooks the elderly. The portrayal of dementia in this novel is both sympathetic and profoundly moving, capturing the emotional complexity of the experience.

Maud's character is both exasperating and compelling, embodying the kind of older protagonist I yearn to encounter more in literature.

How could I not love this spry elderly widow who self-describes as an "LOL" ("Little Old Lady")? Especially when she pulls a solo midnight stakeout after the police won't follow her advice? I love how Ivy turns a senior's apparent "invisibility" to society into a strength—and a crime-fighting attribute.

Ivy's struggle to find her place in the aging process, her strong friendships, and her "mutant curiosity gene" appeal to my heart.

Henry Pulling, a reluctantly retired bank manager, meets his 70-ish-year-old Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than 50 years at his mother’s funeral. His Aunt is vibrant, even outrageous, and he is anything but—a man whose only hobby is growing dahlias. An Aunt myself, I love a story about a wild, non-traditional Aunt, and her relationship with her nephew. As the title suggests, the story is told through the eyes of Henry. His views of his life and their travels are filled with humor and insight. The joy of this novel follows the challenges that arise when two generations confront their expectations of each other and themselves—expectations that are never more alive than when we travel. 

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.

This novel of Aganetha, a 104-year-old woman who looks back on her years as a runner in the 1928 Olympics is as much a story about aging and the examination of one’s life, as it is about the glory days of her feat. I loved the idea of this woman at such an advanced age reflecting on her past, on what she has seen and experienced, and all the details of the events are beautifully rendered. This is an intimate yet propulsive novel that takes us through issues of gender equality, abortion, and all the obstacles that Aganetha would have faced as a female athlete.