A senior citizens’ center and a daycare collide with hilarious results in the new ensemble comedy from New York Times- bestselling author Clare Pooley

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. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, 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 tiny friends in the daycare next door—as well as the teenage 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.

My Review

How To Age Disgracefully is my third book by this author and I really loved it. It has an eclectic mix of characters, just like the other two books.

Of course the first has to be Daphne, a glamorous but ill-tempered 70 year old, with whom I have literally NOTHING in common (I’m 71). What would I think of her if I met her? I certainly wasn’t sure at first.

Then we have Art, a failed actor, who at 75 is way past his sell by date, thespianly speaking, and whose personal hygiene is dubious, to say the least. His best friend since childhood is William.

Lydia is my favourite character (apart from Maggie Thatcher – more in a bit). She runs a Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week for the over 70s at the local community centre, but hasn’t got a clue what she’s doing. She has no natural authority, and the olds run rings round her, as does her ghastly husband Jeremy. But her heart is in the right place – she just needs a bit of encouragement, and maybe a kick up the bum where J is concerned. And a little less obsession with macrame plant holders.

Ziggy is doing his A levels at school, but has a baby daughter called Kylie, following a disastrous one-off shag in the stationary cupboard with Jenna who doesn’t want the baby. He wants to go to University, but how will that ever be possible?

When one of the group collapses and dies at the first meeting, Lydia ends up fostering her scruffy terrier Margaret Thatcher, who makes up for her unusual appearance by being extremely clever. But what is going to happen to her in the long run?

The actual story revolves around the Community Centre itself, which is going to be demolished, to make way for yet more unaffordable housing, Together with a few more pensioners, the kids at the nursery where Kylie goes and various other groups who meet there, how can they save it before the bulldozers arrive? They need to raise at least £100,000 in two weeks.

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author, and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read. I absolutely adored it.

About the Author

Clare Pooley graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge and spent twenty years in the heady world of advertising. Clare’s memoir – The Sober Diaries – has helped thousands of people around the world to quit drinking. The Authenticity Project, Clare’s first novel, was a New York Times bestseller, a BBC Radio 2 book club pick, and winner of the RNA debut novel award.

Clare’s second novel – The People on Platform 5 in the UK, and Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting in the USA – is out now. How to Age Disgracefully is her third novel.