Published in 2025
270 pages
Carol Lefevre has published eight books, as well as short fiction, essays and journalism. Her novella Murmurations was shortlisted for the 2021 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Fiction Prize in the 2022 South Australian Festival Awards for Literature. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, where she is a Visiting Research Fellow. She lives in Adelaide, where she tends a small garden of fruit trees, roses and herbs.
What is this book about?
It is a daunting prospect to grow old in a time and place that does not value old people, but the generation known as Boomers should not be so easily dismissed.
Carol Lefevre’s Bloomer documents the year in which she turned seventy, an age designated ‘young old’ in the stages of later life. Framed by the turning of the seasons in her small suburban garden, memoir threads through meditations on various aspects of ageing – from its hidden grief and potential for loneliness to the ways we experience time and memory and our relationship with the past and with our own mortality.
This is a gorgeous, optimistic and eloquent book for everyone who is alive and getting older yet can still find a younger version of themselves somewhere inside. It is for anyone with an interest in the challenges and rewards of ageing, and most of all it is for those who want to subvert the negative imagery around Boomers and emerge instead as Bloomers, people not at the end of things but still on their way and fully intent on embracing a late-life flourishing.
