Reader Penny recommends Charles Chadwick’s It’s All Right Now on The Shelf today, and I second that — heartily. In fact, I plan on writing about the novel at greater length sometime in the future. (I played a very small, supporting role in its U.S. publication.)

Chadwick (at left) was in his 70s when It’s All Right Now was published — he had been working on the book, on and off, for three decades. The New York Times recently looked at the trend of writers producing well into old age:

The geriatric writer, the one who persists into the twilight years, is something new. There were always exceptions, of course — long-lived authors who defied the actuarial tables. Thomas Hardy, for example, wrote (poetry, not novels) well into his 80s and once modestly confided that he remained sexually active as an octogenarian. (He was too old-fashioned to think there might be a connection.) But by and large writing used to be a profession whose practitioners, the great ones especially, died relatively young.