Last Resort

What compels a thirtysomething Canadian novelist to set her debut in a Florida community teeming with octogenarians? In Palm Meridian, Grace Flahive could be writing about her own precarious future. The year is 2067. The polar ice caps have melted and tropical storms batter the coast. The “sprawling Disney empire” is little more than barnacled rubble. “By now, a third of the United States was without a reliable power grid,” Flahive writes. “California was on fire more than it wasn’t. There was a generally held belief in Florida that the whole of Orlando could explode in a giant fireball, and Washington wouldn’t know or care for at least a week.”

But inside the Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, queer women in their seventies and eighties —“precious things on an increasingly tumultuous planet”— are getting tipsy in hat-making class, podcasting in their spare time, and organizing tap dance recitals. Even though the lights flicker and cell service is spotty, the...