Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting

Iona, the outrageous magazine advice writer, takes her dog Lulu with her every day as they make the 10 stops from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station by train. She only knows them by their nicknames—Impossibly Pretty Bookworm and Terribly Lonely Teenager—and she sees them every day. Naturally, they never communicate. Experienced travelers never do.

Then one morning, in front of her, the guy she refers to as Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape. If Sanjay, a nurse, hadn't performed the Heimlich technique on him in a timely manner, he would have perished. An diverse group of individuals with nothing in common except their commute learn that a fortuitous contact may develop into much more when this one incident sets off a series of events. It turns out you can learn a lot about yourself and the world around you by striking up a conversation with strangers.