BEST BOOKS ON... CARE HOMES

THERE is a majestic, historic building near my home in London, which houses a residential home. Before my younger son started school, we would scoot past the wrought-iron railings and admire the place. He called it ‘the old people’s palace’.

It was founded in the late 17th century by a merchant-adventurer as a hospice for ‘poor Merchants... and such as they have lost their Estates by accidents, dangers and perils of the seas or by any other accidents, ways or means in their honest endeavours to get their living by means of Merchandising’.

Today, it takes in elderly former professionals who have fallen on hard times. I rather like the idea that someone who might have led a rewarding, exciting life but experienced hard luck late on, might still find a safe, final berth.

Old-folks’-home literature has had a bit of a moment in the fiction charts in recent years. Novelists like working with enclosed communities, and few have as much potential for pitch-black humour, poignant human frailty and evil exploitation as a retirement complex.

In Olive, Again, American novelist Elizabeth Strout returns to her most brilliant creation, the clever, crotchety, often regrettably honest Maine resident, Olive Kitteridge.

We first re-encounter Olive as a lonely widow, still semi-estranged from her only son, but an object of interest to a widower. By the end of this novel of interconnected stories, she is in a sheltered housing scheme where, perhaps for the first time, she makes a proper female friend.

Female friendship is also pivotal to Joanna Cannon’s Three Things About Elsie, which finds Florence, 84, fretting that the new resident at Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly is a dangerous ghost from her past.

Some prefer to age disgracefully. Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred-YearOld Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared follows Allan, who blows out his own centenary party to seek adventure. Even towards the end of life, there can still be new beginnings.