Jess knows it’s time to move on from her best friend’s couch, where she’s been crashing since her boyfriend emptied out her heart, and all her savings. But when she responds to an ad in the newspaper for a lodger on a quiet Notting Hill street, Jess has no idea how life’s about to change. Joan has spent too long alone with her memories of the man she walked away from one Manhattan evening years ago. Passing a bedroom door she can’t bear to open, she decides to advertise for a lodger. When Jess meets Joan, she recognises a woman left behind by the world, and so she suggests a switch: if Joan will agree to go on-line, she will go off-line. And when Jess learns Joan has never forgotten the love of her life, a man she used to write to via the Lonely Hearts column, Jess decides to search for him, little realising that in Joan’s story lies her own unexpected new beginning.