First Lines of "Rollback"

"It had been a good life.
Donald Halifax looked around the living room that he and his wife.Sarah had shared for sixty years now, and that thought kept coming back to him. Oh, there had been ups and downs, and the downs had seemed excursions into the flames of hell at the time--the lingering death of his mother, Sarah's battle with breast cancer, the rough periods their marriage had gone through--but, on balance, when all was said and done, it had been a good life."
- Robert J Sawyer, from Rollback

Picked up Rollback as my "easy" book as I work my way through Tom McCarthy's C (which has gotten much better than I wrote about the other day). One of the reasons I'm so excited about Sawyer's novel is because it's about older people dealing with new challenges, as opposed to most of SciFi which typically deals with young people. Here, the premise of this book is that an older woman has to get back into the game after a series of communications she sent out into space are answered 60 years after they were sent. There are complications - that's what makes the story really interesting - but the focus on older people is refreshing.