When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. These seniors look deceptively benign --- but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide. When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their friends in the daycare next door --- as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog --- to save the building. Together, this group’s unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don’t catch up with them first.

Every day, Iona, a larger-than-life magazine advice columnist, travels the 10 stops from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station by train, accompanied by her dog, Lulu. She sees the same people, whom she knows only by nickname. Of course, they never speak. Seasoned commuters never do. Then one morning, the man she calls Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right in front of her. He’d have died were it not for the timely intervention of Sanjay, a nurse, who gives him the Heimlich maneuver. This single event starts a chain reaction, and an eclectic group of people with almost nothing in common except their commute discover that a chance encounter can blossom into much more.

Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian, believes that most people aren't really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes --- in a plain, green journal --- the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It's run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves --- and soon find each other In Real Life at Monica's Café.