The Authenticity Project: The feel-good novel you need right now

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I felt like shaking her and telling her to get a real life instead of a pretend one displayed on Instagram. Imagine you are walking down a deserted path and you come upon a bench and there is a journal left behind. Our social life revolved around the Chelsea Arts Club, and the bistros and boutiques of the King's Road and Sloane Square.

Monica thought of Mary, exhausted after a long shift delivering other women's babies, wondering where her husband had gone.

The two of them had, so the rumors went, traded insults (and, the implication was, women) over the years.

It begins when elderly Julian leaves an exercise book in Monica’s café, with the title The Authenticity Project carefully lettered on the cover. 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. But it didn’t have me rushing to read the next chapter, and it was a little too light-hearted for me. Not only does this story show the reality of humanity, it shows the ripple effect that each person can have on each other.

Her plan is to weasel him out of his cave by advertising for an artist to teach drawing at her café. Pooley was obviously going for a Love, Actually/Four Weddings and a Funeral type interconnecting characters feel.

You just kinda have to go with the idea that some people aren't concerned about their privacy and make it fairly easy for the next reader of the notebook to figure out their identity. When I did finally emerge from my cocoon, about five years later, neighbors had moved, friends had given up, my agent had written me off, and that's when I realized I had become unnoticeable. It's ironic that Mary, who would have happily accepted the inevitability of aging, died at the relatively young age of sixty, and yet I'm still here, forced to watch myself gradually crumble away.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. These are some of the words written on the inside of the green notebook titled The Authenticity Project.

The book was recommended to my book club and I will be passing that information along to other book clubs. You get multiple points of view in this book which are clear, and I really enjoyed how certain characters would pop up in the book and then they would get with their own chapter, you get a real sense of the characters inner voice. Social media proves that many people like to share their lives and inner thoughts, authentic or not. I guess this is chick-lit, so I looked at the only other such book I reviewed, nearly 14 years ago, Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret? At the very least, for this type of multi-character book to work, you need to fall in love with the characters and their plights.At the same time, it forms a community of sorts, kindred spirits in need of some kind of support or comfort. Unfortunately, I’ve come to discover that good intentions (and, in this case, a good idea/premise) doesn’t necessarily mean a good read.