This self-help style book focuses on sex in later life and combines case studies, sex and relationship education, sex tips and problem-page types of discussion. Each chapter takes a particular topic, with titles such as ‘Reviving Desire’, ‘Sex Toys: Now More Than Ever’, ‘Surviving Divorce, Breakup, Betrayal’, ‘Erectile Dysfunction: Women Speak Out’ and ‘Better Now Than Ever: The Joys of Older Age Sex’. The main text is written by Price herself, often reflecting briefly on her own experiences of later life sex. This text is interspersed with stories from other older people that she has assembled from questionnaires filled in by people recruited via her blog and speaking engagements. Sometimes these stories stand alone as case studies of the issue being discussed in that chapter, at other times they are treated in problem-page format with the ‘answer’ coming either from Price or ‘An Expert’. Most chapters additionally contain boxed texts titled ‘Advice from an Expert’.

While this book is not an academic book and is aimed at a general readership of older people, it is likely to be of interest to researchers and students of sexuality, as an example of the explosion of discourse around later life sexuality in recent years (Gott Reference Gott2005; Marshall Reference Marshall2002). It is interesting to contrast it with one of the first books for older people discussing sex (Greengross and Greengross Reference Greengross and Greengross1989), published more than 20 years ago. Price's voice is markedly more liberal and permissive, to the extent that it sometimes sits oddly with a more conservative discourse of sexuality expressed in the stories. Her advice is also much franker and more specific: ‘make sure you can work the controls on a vibrator without wearing your reading glasses’; different types of vulval and vaginal pain; the pros and cons of different types of lubricant. The explicitness of the content is signalled by the quote chosen for the cover of the book ‘While this groundbreaking book will have some of you blushing, you won't put it down’. I can't help suspecting that a self-help book aimed at younger people with a similar degree of explicitness would not need to carry this kind of ‘health warning’ about the content, suggesting, perhaps, that later life sex is still not normative, for all that it may be becoming normalised.

In terms of shifting normativities, I was also interested to note that the chapter titled ‘Off the Beaten Path: Nontraditional Sex Practices and Relationships’, which I had assumed would be about lesbian and gay (and possibly also bisexual and trans) older people made no mention of these groups. Rather, this chapter discusses different forms of consensual non-monogamy; BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism); younger men in relationships with older women; and sex over the internet or on the phone. This is very far indeed from the terrain of Greengross and Greengross (Reference Greengross and Greengross1989). Accounts from older lesbians are sprinkled throughout the book and treated as ordinary and on a par with those from heterosexual men and women. No accounts from non-heterosexual men were evident, except in the chapter ‘Erectile Dysfunction: What Men Don't Say Out Loud’ where she comments ‘I realise this chapter seems heterosexually oriented. I didn't plan it that way. Many more straight than gay men were willing to share their stories about ED, and many women sent me questions about their male partners’ (p. 241). She then presents accounts from two gay or bisexual men.

Researchers interested in the social construction of age and ageing may also find this book of interest for the ways in which age is made relevant. While some of the problems discussed are specific to ageing bodies, many are issues that may affect people of all ages (poor communication, lack of intimacy, mismatched desires, boredom). However, the fact that this book focuses on ageing and later life has the effect of making it seem as if these problems also are an artefact of ageing. The book includes one account from someone aged 49 and many from people in their fifties. While this definition of ‘senior’ has much to recommend it in terms of conceptualising ageing as a lifelong process rather than a state, it does have the effect of sometimes seeming to make age salient when other factors might actually be more relevant.