"Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon - the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him "the bitter neighbor from hell." But behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove's mailbox,...

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from...

Sixty-one-year-old fifth-grade teacher Liam Pennywell, having been forced into retirement, is attacked shortly after moving into his new condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore, and embarks on a mission to recover memories which he lost during the incident, which results in an unlikely friendship with a woman half his age.

"Bob Comet is a retired librarian, isolated but not lonely, living out his quiet days in a mint-colored house in Oregon, surrounded by his books and small comforts. One morning, out on his daily walk, he performs an act of kindness that brings him into contact with a nearby senior center, where he soon begins volunteering. Here, as a community of peers and friends gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from...

In a Southern nursing home, an 80-year-old man reads from his diary to his wife, suffering from Alzheimer's. It's the story of their teenage romance, followed by years of separation because he was from the wrong class, followed by her decision, on his return from World War II, to be her own woman and marry him. Set amid the austere beauty of coastal North Carolina in 1946, The Notebook begins with the story of Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner returned...

From the "dean of Western writers" (The New York Times) and the Pulitzer Prize winning–author of Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety, his National Book Award–winning novel

A Penguin Classic
Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors...

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured the golden age of comic books, interwining history, legend and story-telling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to create a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that re-imagines the classic 19th-century detective story.

In deep retirement in the English countryside, an 89-year old man, vaguely recollected

...

A bitter eighty-three-year-old war veteran who believes his life is meaningless dies while trying to save a little girl's life and finds himself in heaven, where five people from his past--some loved ones, some strangers--explain what his years on Earth really meant, and whether or not he succeeded in saving the child.