It’s time for the hen to strut her stuff!
As an estimated eighty million baby boomers reach the magical mark of fifty, it makes sense that boomer generation readers want to identify with fictional characters who share similar life experiences. Labeled matron lit, hen lit or lady lit – these books are aimed at women age 40 to 70, as the female protagonists are dealing with such topics as hot flashes, aging parents and widowhood. Matron literature tells a powerful story about facing lifes’ challenges and persevering.
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Description: Lovely home, lovely husband, lovely family: apart from the envy of her less contented sister, everything in Dily’s rags-to-riches life is lovely, lovely, lovely. Until the day she meets a man at a railway station who is also–lovely.
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Description: Coburn brings to life with tremendous heart, humor, and wisdom the Pacific Northwest enclave of Owl Island and its many unforgettable inhabitants.
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Description: A send-up of “Pride and Prejudice” set in a Florida retirement village follows a circle of retirees on a voyage of love and manners.
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Description: Divorced and estranged from her grown daughters, Candida Wilton moves to a rundown flat well below her means and finds exhilaration in her self-imposed poverty, during which she confides her thoughts to a computer and makes friends with new peers.
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Description: Having left behind the island family cottage of her youth, a soul-weary woman struggles to come to terms with questionable choices from her past while endeavoring to remember life lessons about love and magic.
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Description: Two look-alike women–the wife and mistress of a BMW dealer–trade places to see if the grass really is greener on the other side.
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Description: After twenty-four years of marriage and two daughters, Elizabeth and Jackson Shore have drifted apart.
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Description: Midlife isn’t a crisis for Clair Hayden until the day a former classmate fails to recognize her. With an empty nest, a body heading south, and a marital spark that seems to be sputtering, she knows she has to do something. She learns that even while she’s “wasting away” on the outside, with God’s help she’s being renewed inwardly day by day.
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Description: Jenna Thomas is in Bali doing the unthinkable, looking for her daughter, Sofie, allegedly the victim of a terrorist attack. She prays that it is a mistake, but when Sofie’s body is found, Jenna must confront the fact that her young, beautiful daughter is dead. Her ex-husband, Mark, finds her at the hotel, and they console each other physically, something they haven’t done since the divorce and Mark’s remarriage.
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Description: Judith Singer, a widowed history professor at St. Elizabeth’s College on Long Island, gets wrapped up in a murder mystery when her neighbor is accused of killing his wife. The twist is that the man is the son of the notorious mobster Philip “Fancy Phil” Lowenstein.
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Description: Kirk Keswick has lead a perfectly happy life working for London’s Ballantine & Company Auctioneer, with no thoughts of love on her mind, but her world is turned upside down when an American scoundrel and womanizer sweeps her off her feet.
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Description: Every two years, a tight-knit group of Southern women, friends since college, come together for a reunion to renew their relationships with one another, each of them having an incredible story to tell about the course their lives have taken.
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Description: Anticipating the onset of her later years, Maggie leaves behind her manipulative daughters and psychoanalyst lover to accompany her best friend, Connie, for one final fling, but a series of misadventures prompts their desperate, gun-toting journey to a Texas ranch.
Medlicott, Joan (Ladies of Covington Series)
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Description: 52 year-old Kate Harding faces her second winter since the death of her husband. As she begins to read a collection of letters recently retrieved from the attic of her grandparents’ house, Kate discovers that what to a child seemed a serene and blissful marriage was in fact founded on a tragic event.
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Description: Julie Roseman and Romeo Cacciamani want nothing more than some time for themselves, but they get more than they bargained for when a back injury puts Romeo flat on his back in Julie’s bedroom and Julie’s oldest daughter arrives.
Ross, Ann B. (Miss Julia Series)
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Description: Best friends since high school, a tightly knit club of five southern women rallies together when one of their husbands is discovered to be having an affair.
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Description: Amanda Kincaid spends her family’s annual summer vacation on Long Island thinking about the changes in her life and what she wants for the future.
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Description: Faye, Marilyn, Alice, and Shirley–four middle-aged women who are all feeling over the hill and out of life–get together to form the Hot Flash Club, where they band together to help each other and get the most out of life.
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Description: One day Sheila decides she’s had enough of being invisible to her own family, moves to another town and gets herself a job–caring for a boy whose mother has abandoned the family.
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Description: Reveals the roots of the Ya-Yas’ friendship in the 1930s and roars with all the raw power of Vivi Abbott Walker’s 1962 T-Bird through sixty years of marriage, child-raising, and hair-raising family secrets.
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Description: When her husband “Turtle” suddenly dies, Rowtina Washington is shattered. Thankfully, Rowtina can lean on the Leave Him and Live Sisterhood, a group of women who help her understand that grief can be overcome, and that there’s always a chance for a happy ending.
