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When age makes you invisible, secrets are easier to hide Lydia imagines her new job running a Senior Citizen''s Social Club three afternoons a week will involve drinking tea while playing gentle games of cards, listening to The Beatles and reminiscing about food rationing and The Blitz. She does not expect to find a failed actor addicted to shoplifting, a woman who''s been hiding from a mysterious and very chequered past, and a prolific yarn-bomber. It turns out that their ideas about how to spend their afternoons are very different. After a tragic accident means the council threatens to sell the community centre, the Social Club, aided by their friends in the nursery next door and a geriatric orphaned mongrel, set out to save it. They might not be able to save the hall, but they might just save each other - if their pasts don''t catch up with them first...
About the author
Clare Pooley graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge and spent twenty years in the heady world of advertising, before becoming a full-time writer.
Clare's dark but hilarious memoir, The Sober Diaries, has helped thousands of people around the world to quit drinking.
The Authenticity Project, Clare's debut novel, was a BBC Radio 2 bookclub pick, a New York Times bestseller, the winner of the RNA debut novel award and a Babelio award. It's been translated into 29 languages.
The People on Platform 5 is Clare's second novel, inspired by her fascination with inventing stories about her fellow passengers on her commute to work.
Clare lives in Fulham, London with her husband, three children and two border terriers.
Report
Uplifting, heartwarming and joyful. Restored my faith in humankind, it's the perfect book to escape to in these troubled times. So funny, so moving, and so glad I read it. Ruth Jones
