The Authenticity Project

Julian Jessop is a lonely, eccentric artist in his seventies, and he has a theory: most people never tell one another the truth about themselves. To test it, he writes an honest account of his own life in a plain green notebook and leaves it on a table in his local café, hoping a stranger will pick it up.

The café belongs to Monica, a meticulous and highly efficient woman who quietly adds an entry of her own before carrying the notebook across the street to a wine bar. From there it keeps moving. Each person who finds it writes down something real about who they are, and before long the people behind those confessions begin to meet face to face at Monica's Café.

Among them are Hazard, a charming addict who vows to get sober, and Alice, a polished mommy Instagrammer whose actual life is far messier than her feed suggests. Together with the other readers of the notebook, they form a funny, prickly and sometimes painful circle of new friends, and for some of them the connection grows into something more.

Clare Pooley's novel is a warm, humane story about the nerve it takes to drop the act and let others see you as you are. Its characters learn that honesty is less frightening than they feared, and that on the other side of it there may be something that looks a lot like happiness.